As she paused in the recital I rashly anticipated the conclusion, that her bitter experiences had brought the whole question to that tribunal of personal conduct whose concrete findings stir us to our very marrow with shame and remorse; that she had frantically striven as we all do, to keep herself from falling into the pit where the demons of self-reproach dwell, by clinging to the conventional judgments of the world. I expected her to set them forth at great length in self-justification, and perhaps, belonging, as she so obviously did, to an older school, she might even assure me that the wrong to those to whom it was now impossible to make reparation had forever lifted her above committing another such injustice. I found, however, that I was absolutely mistaken and that whatever might be true of her, it still lay within me to commit a gross injustice, when she resumed with these words: “It is a long time since I ceased to urge in my own defence that I was but reflecting the attitude of society, for, in my efforts to get at the root of the matter I have been convinced that the conventional attitude cannot be defended, certainly not upon religious grounds.” She stopped as if startled by her own reflections upon the subject of the social ostracism so long established and so harshly enforced that women seem to hold to it as through an instinct of self-preservation. She was, perhaps, dimly conscious that the tradition that the unchaste woman should be an outcast from society rests upon a solid basis of experience, upon the long struggle of a multitude of obscure women who, from one generation to another, were frantically determined to establish the paternity of their children and to force the father to a recognition of his obligations; and that the living representatives of these women instinctively rise up in honest rebellion against any attempt to loosen the social control which such efforts have established, bungling and cruel though the control may be. Further conversation showed that she also realized that these stern memories inherited from the past have an undoubted social value and that it is a perilous undertaking upon which certain women of this generation are bent in their efforts to deal a belated justice to the fallen woman. It involves a clash within the very mass of inherited motives and impulses as well as a clash between old conventions and contemporary principles. On the other hand, it must have been obvious to her in her long effort to get at “the root of the matter” that the punishment and hatred of the bad woman has gone so far as to overreach its own purpose; it has become responsible for such hardness of heart on the part of “respectable” women towards the so-called fallen ones, that punishment is often inflicted not only without regard to justice, but in order to feed the spiritual pride, “I am holier than thou.” Such pride erects veritable barricades, deliberately shutting out sympathetic understanding.