Maternal affection and solicitude, in woman’s remembering heart, may at length coalesce into a chivalric protection for all that is young and unguarded. This chivalry of women expressing protection for those at the bottom of society, so far as it has already developed, suggests a return to that idealized version of chivalry which was the consecration of strength to the defence of weakness, unlike the actual chivalry of the armed knight who served his lady with gentle courtesy while his fields were ploughed by peasant women misshapen through toil and hunger. As an example of this new chivalry, the Hungarian women have recently risen in protest against a proposed military regulation requiring that all young women in domestic service, who are living in the vicinity of barracks, be examined each week by medical officers in order to protect the soldiers from disease. The good women in Hungary spiritedly resented the assumption that these girls, simply because they are the least protected of any class in the community, should be subjected to this insult. An instance of this sort once again illustrates that moral passion is the only solvent for prejudice, and that women have come to feel reproached and disturbed when they ignore the dynamic urgency of memories as fundamental as those upon which prohibitive conventions are based. CHAPTER IV WOMEN’S MEMORIES--INTEGRATING INDUSTRY If it has always been the mission of literature to translate the particular act into something of the universal, to reduce the element of crude pain in the isolated experience by bringing to the sufferer a realization that his is but the common lot, this mission may have been performed through such stories as that of the Devil Baby for simple, hardworking women who at any given moment compose the bulk of the women in the world. Certainly some of the visitors to the Devil Baby attempted to generalize and evidently found a certain enlargement of the horizon, an interpretation of life as it were, in the effort. They exhibited that confidence which sometimes comes to the more literate person when, finding himself morally isolated among those hostile to his immediate aims, his reading assures him that other people in the world have thought as he does. Later when he dares to act on the conviction his own experience has forced upon him, he has become so conscious of a cloud of witnesses torn out of literature and warmed into living comradeship, that he scarcely distinguishes them from the likeminded people actually in the world whom he has later discovered as a consequence of his deed.