The sort of revolution they brought about was no new thing. There always had been and always will be women of thirty years, quite aware of their age; but these were in addition keen-sighted, psychological women, who meant to get to the bottom of the phenomenon and measure its intensity with the eye of a connoisseur, for it seemed to them that they were entering into life. The children, who had been the _raison d’être_ of the home, were about to go out into the world, or had already gone. As soon as he could, the first-born son, that dear little boy whom the mother loved, asked and obtained a little money and disappeared. Henceforth he was hardly mentioned; he now had his own affairs, his own pleasures, and when he wrote it would be a postscript, affectionate but rather concise: “Madam, I had forgotten to write and say I have learnt that you have given me a little brother named Guy. I beseech you, Madam, see him well nourished, for I love him well.” Sometimes news came that, far away, Death had rudely snapped the last remaining tie, and from the truly heroic words which then burst from certain courageous mothers’ hearts, we see how hardened their souls had become, and how the noblest and most dearly loved of them had been compelled, in their thorny life, to form the painful but admirable habit of sacrificing their affections to the very uttermost. Gabrielle de Bourbon was announcing to her officers the death of her only son, killed at Marignan. Aloud she said: “in this battle that the King has won”; but in a whisper she added: “which has brought such heavy woe upon us.” That sweet women whose very nature is to love should go out, when all fails them thus, into the world, like the bees of God, to gather a little honey and labour for the common hive, is not very surprising. They prefer “a little love from many to a great deal from one,”[113]—especially when that one does not love them! And so marriage comes to serve them as a refuge when on their honey-quest. It is like the lodge in which hunters take up their quarters, to be nearer their game and to shelter themselves from the weather. The women rejoice at having it. Nevertheless, before studying these emancipated women as they play their part manlike away from home, we have still to examine a final objection of principle, which was strong enough to hold some of them back. Many moralists, even without bias against feminism, reproach the women with owing their philanthropy to a horror of marriage; according to them, the mission to the world upon which the women wished to enter was for them a means of evading their domestic duties.