“That is true, Gnädige Frau, we preferred to put a man’s name on the cover. You see a big historical, biographical work like that with a woman’s name upon it would be seriously handicapped in Germany. Fifty years ago, aye, twenty years ago in England, you women were hiding your identity under the manly names of George Eliot, George Trafford, George anything. Well, we are still in that condition in Germany, not as regards novels, but as regards more serious work.” True, O publisher, and yet with all this female emancipation, with all the _Reform Kleider_ which stand for advancement in Germany, it really was amusing. Five years later the girls of the Fatherland were reading risky books and taken to see risky plays, such was the rapidity with which the pendulum of ultra-propriety swung the other way. CHAPTER X THE END OF A CENTURY The close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was the subject of much notice both in drawing-room talks and articles in the papers. The latter recapitulated all that the march of science and civilisation had effected. Private persons spoke gaily or piously anent “turning over a new leaf.” For me? Well, it was much the same as with the rest of nature. My life went on through 1900 with only this difference, that it had grown—grown certainly in the past years of striving to put forth one’s self. Personally the end of the old century marked a new departure, and was the starting-point of much interesting public work—work, by the way, that only a few short years before might not have seemed so enticing to the then young Society woman as it was now to the thoroughly interested worker. In 1899 the International Council of Women, under that brilliant worker the Countess of Aberdeen, had met in London. It was a tremendous undertaking, and I served on several of the committees. The one, however, which took most of my time and thought was the Agricultural Section, for which I was the Convener, and finally took the chair. It seems a funny thing for a writer to have taken the chair at the proceedings of an Agricultural Section, but this was the outcome of the pamphlet on butter-making, and the endless articles I had then written about women taking up dairy-work in this country. The Agricultural Section was a novelty, and, I am glad to say, proved a success. I never felt more nervous in my life, although supported on the platform by many able people, among them the Earl of Aberdeen. Viscount Templetown sat next to me, and primed me in what to say, rang bells when the allotted space of time had been filled by some speaker, and generally acted as call-boy and prompter combined. And Professor James Robertson, Agricultural Commissioner of Canada, travelled to this country purposely to speak for me. I felt terribly impressed by the solemnity of the entertainment, the whole section being a new departure.