The new woman lives in the present, sometimes even in the future—her land of romance! The enthusiasm of the old romanticism about a “hut and a heart” has little charm for her. For she knows reality and that prevents her from giving credence to the feminine illusion that twice two can be five. What she does know, on the contrary, is that out of fours she can gradually work out sixteen. While the women of former times could only save, the new woman can acquire. Woman’s beautiful, foolish superstition regarding life has vanished, but her eagerness to achieve can still remove mountains, her daring has still often the splendour of a dream. Intellectual values are for her no longer pastimes but necessities of life; with her culture has developed her feeling for truth and justice. This does not secure the new woman immunity at all times from new illusions and errors of feeling, nor does it prevent her developing passions whose value, to say the least, is questionable. But in and through her determination “to be some one,” to have a characteristic personality, she has acquired a love of life, in its diverse manifestations, both good and evil; a new capacity to enjoy her own and others’ individuality, as well as a new joy—sometimes an unblushing, insolent joy—in expressing her own being. In place of the earlier resignation toward society, the expression of rebellion is found even in the sparkling eye of the school-girl, with red cap upon her curly hair. The young women of to-day, married or single, mothers as well as those who are childless, are still more vigorous in soul, more courageous, more eager for life than are men. Because all that which for men has so long been a matter of course, is for women new, rich, enchanting, comprising, as it does, free life in nature, scientific studies, serious artistic work economic independence. Even in a fine and soulful woman there is found something of the inevitable hardness toward herself and others of which an observer is instinctively conscious when he speaks of some woman as one who “will go far” upon the course she has chosen. The modern young woman desires above all else the elevation of her own personality. She experiences the same feeling of joy a man is conscious of when she realises that her strength of will is augmented, her ability becoming more certain, her depth of thought greater, her association of ideas richer. She stands ready to choose _her_ work and follow _her_ fate; in sorrow as in joy she experiences the blessedness of growth, and she loves her view of life and the work to which she has dedicated herself, often as devotedly as man loves his.