As the bird’s nest is made of nothing but bits of straw and down, so the feeling of home is fashioned out of soft, simple things; out of little activities that are neither ponderable nor measurable as political or as economic factors. When Segantini painted the two nuns looking wistfully into the bird’s nest, he gave expression to the deepest pain that many modern women experience, the pain resulting from the consciousness that their life, notwithstanding its freedom, is lonely, because it has denied them the privilege of making a home and as a consequence has failed to afford them the joy of creation, which nature intended they should have, and of continuity of life in children to whom they gave birth. Here we stand at a point where the woman movement parallels the other social revolutions, undeviatingly as the rails of a track, and leads to the same objective. Modern men and women, and especially women, have forfeited an opportunity for happiness in the loss of the feeling of homogeneity and security. Just as formerly the property-holding family felt a secure sense of proprietorship in the ancestral estate, so every member of the home group felt himself safe in the family. Now the children cannot depend with certainty upon the parents, nor the parents upon the children; the wife upon the husband, nor the husband upon the wife. Each in extremity relies only upon himself. The character of man is thus altered quite as much as trees are changed when they are left standing alone in the denuded forest of which they once formed a part. If they can withstand the storms, they have produced more “character” than they had when they stood close together, under a mutual protection that nevertheless enforced uniformity. From their earliest youth innumerable women must now care for themselves, as well as decide for themselves. Thus the feeling of independence of modern woman has increased through the sacrifice of her peace; her individual characteristics, at the expense of her harmony. Her feeling of loneliness is mitigated to a certain degree by the growing feeling of community with the whole. But this feeling cannot compensate certain natures for the forfeiture of the advantages which women of earlier times possessed, when they sat secure and protected within the four walls of the home, sucked the juice from family chronicles, guarded family traditions, maintained the old holiday customs, lived at the same time in the past and in the present.