It is not to be wondered at that the emancipated women, exactly as all recently emancipated masculine classes and races, at first groped insecurely after a new form. The astonishing thing, on the contrary, is that women adapted themselves so quickly to the new circumstances; that the transition period furnished so few grotesque types; that the present shows so many harmonious types, each in her own way. This harmony of single women is no mere form. It has its inner counterpart in the satisfaction with their existence, an existence in accord with their desires. The psychology was not exhaustive which saw in feminism only a “spinster question,” a question of the unmarried woman, springing from the surplus of women and the increasing difficulty or disinclination of men to contract marriage—a question therefore for the ugly, not for the beautiful; for the unmarried, not for the married; for the poor, not for the rich. For a great number of beautiful women prefer to remain unmarried; a great number of rich desire to work; a great number of married women are zealous suffragists. Fifty years ago, we saw the most clever women idealise an ape into a god; now, the modern, intelligent working girl, when she looks about her for her ideal, exercises a lively criticism. She often flirts with one who exhibits some phase of the ideal, but she has too clear an understanding and too much to do to _imagine_ a great feeling for one who is unworthy. So it often happens that youth has passed without such a feeling having stirred her. And she enters without deep regret the age when ambition and desire for power become her life stimulants. From these women of predominating mind and will is formed more and more what Ferrero calls “The third sex,” Maudsley, “The sexless ant”: energetic, clever, happy in their work, cool, but sound; in private life, in the zeal of everyday work, often egoistic but willing to make sacrifices in face of social exigencies. So a great part of the fifty-year-old women form an exception since they with true instinct have remained unmarried. For in the same degree that their metallic being is well adapted to the machinery of society, it is little qualified to make a home for husband and children. They do not depreciate however the value of this task, unless they be fanatic feminists. In that event they reproach the women who wish to marry with “betraying the woman cause”; they demand at times, as imperative loyalty toward this cause, that their friends shall protest against the present marriage laws at least by the form of their marriage alliance if not even by not marrying at all. Their theory of equality has at times been carried so far that—as recently happened in France—they advocate women’s performing also masculine military service.