You will find to-day, among women seventy or eighty years of age, one or another type of that fine culture which the gifted single woman, in comfortable circumstances, could attain in the previous century. Her home, especially if it was an estate in the country, became a cultural fireside which radiated light and heat for relatives and friends. The lesser gifted disseminated, each according to her nature, comfort or discomfort, yet could in extremity at least be sure of the homage of their future heirs. Toward those dependent upon them, these women were sometimes kind, sometimes indifferent, sometimes hard: the feeling of social responsibility was an unknown idea to them. The _penniless_ single women, on the contrary, were found either in one of the “respectable” positions which, however, brought with them a multitude of humiliations: as governess, companion, housekeeper—in Germany also as maid of honour at one of the numerous small courts—or in some charitable institution for gentle folks, an asylum for _pauvres honteuses_; but most frequently in the corner of the home of a relative. This corner was at times the warmest and most confidential in the whole house, that corner which the children sought for stories and sweetmeats; the youth, to find an embrace in which he could pour forth his grief, an ear which listened to his most beautiful dreams. But it happened more frequently that the “aunt” looked upon as a “necessary evil” was in reality that very thing. Humiliated and embittered, she became ingenious in making those about her suffer for her afflictions. Before they became hopelessly old, the “aunts” were the laughing stock of the young through their efforts, in the eleventh hour, to reach the “peaceful haven of matrimony”; and they themselves looked with envious eyes upon the good fortune of the young. We meet the unmarried woman of that time at her best as trusty servant who shared the cares, the joys, and the sorrows of the family and, in her garret chamber, of which she could be certain to the day of her death, she looked back upon a rich life lived vicariously. Not infrequently, she rejected a marriage proposal in order to stay with her beloved master and mistress to whom she knew she was indispensable. The superfluous women previously mentioned would have thrown themselves into the arms of Beelzebub had he come as suitor. When the years passed, when neither their desire for activity nor the thirst of the heart nor of the senses was quenched, then not infrequently insanity conjured up for these lonely women a life-content for which they had longed in vain. To-day, however, we have for the position which the expression, “a forsaken old maid,” betokens an entirely new type: “the glorified spinster,” as the joyous, active, independent unmarried woman is called by the people among whom she first became a reality. Among these women, independent through their work, useful to society,