The very fact that women remain closer to type than men do and are more swayed by the past, makes it difficult for them to defy settled conventions. It adds to their difficulty that the individual women, driven to modify a harsh convention which has become unendurable to them, are perforce those most sensitive to injustice. The sharp struggle for social advance, which is always a struggle between ideas, long before it becomes embodied in contending social groups, may thus find its arena in the tender conscience of one woman who is pitilessly rent and pierced by her warring scruples and affections. Even such a tentative effort in the direction of social advance exacts the usual toll of blood and tears. Fortunately the entire burden of the attempt to modify a convention which has become unsupportable, by no means rests solely upon such self-conscious women. Their analytical efforts are steadily supplemented by instinctive conduct on the part of many others. A great mass of “variation from type,” accelerating this social change, is contributed by simple mothers who have been impelled by the same primitive emotion which the Devil Baby had obviously released in so many old women. This is an overwhelming pity and sense of tender comprehension, doubtless closely related to the compunction characteristic of all primitive people which in the earliest stage of social development long performed the first rude offices of a sense of justice. This early trait is still a factor in the social struggle, for as has often been pointed out, our social state is like a countryside--of a complex geological structure, with outcrops of strata of very diverse ages. Such compunction sometimes carries the grandmother of an illegitimate child to the point of caring for the child when she is still utterly unable to forgive her daughter, the child’s mother. Even that is a step in advance from the time when the daughter was driven from the house and her child, because a bastard, was conscientiously treated as an outcast both by the family and by the community.