the hut, she has children, she grinds the corn! See there, all those baskets--her hands made them full of corn! Then the wrinkles begin to come; see, her breasts get soft; she is old. Then the man comes home at night. 'Make haste, make haste,' he says, 'you do not grind the corn nicely.' She grinds it as she always ground it, but he beats her. 'Make haste, make haste! You are old--you are lazy! What is your face so ugly for?' She works; he beats her. See here"--pointing to her breast as though there were a mark on it--"he beats it with a whip: the blood comes out. Never mind. Take the child, put it at the breast, let it suck: the blood comes on its face. She wipes it off"--with an action of the hand as though she were wiping the blood off an imaginary child's face.--"Then he brings the young wife. The young wife is strong; her arms are still fat. She has still many children in her. The young wife says, 'Do this; do that.' The old wife must not speak. Then the breasts dry up--there is no milk in them. She works in the fields all day. She brings the wood home. 'Make haste! Make haste!' The old wife is done for! There--throw her away; she is good for nothing. Let her sit out there on the dung-heap! She is only a thing! The man can have as many wives as he likes. Yes, there is perhaps a God for the white woman; there is none for the black." Now, what is curious with regard to a state of feeling such as this woman experienced, is that, intensely bitter as she is against the impersonal fate which has made her what she is, keenly as she feels her own servitude, and intensely conscious as she is of her own pain, there is not in her the dawning of a feeling which might ultimately result in rebellion, nor the shadow of a feeling of resentment against even man, nor is there any hope, one might almost say desire, to alter her own position. If you suggest to her that she may alter matters, she looks at you with a leaden-eyed despair, with more than incredulity, almost with condemnation. She looks at you as the tortoise might, on whose back, according to Eastern tradition, the elephant stands who supports the world. If he complained to you that the elephant's feet were heavy on him, and you suggested that he might move out from under them,--"What! and destroy the world, which ultimately depends on me!" Keenly conscious of their suffering, and bitter against fate have been the hearts of numberless women of all ages, but it has been silent bitterness, such as we mortals feel who are conscious of the existence of death from the cradle to the grave, and object strongly to it, but say little, knowing it is useless, and its presence inevitable. What is new is not that woman suffers or knows that she suffers. The woman of to-day probably suffers less than the women of any period, since that most primitive time when men and women both wandered free; the absolutely new thing is her conscious determination to modify her relation to life about her.