"Tante, we, the newest of new women, stretch out our hands to you, the oldest of the old, in the African veld: and we pray of you, stay where you are, and hold fast by what you have, till we come and meet you. We are coming to you in our own way. Stay where you are till we can join hands. In your life of fellow-labour with man, in your social productiveness and activity, you have realized much of that which we are seeking. Do not force your great, free, labouring-woman's foot into the gegawed shoes of the parasite female, from which we are striving to withdraw ours; do not compel yourself to accept those insignia of degeneracy, whether in clothing or bearing, from which we to-day are so passionately striving to free ourselves. Hold by your simple brave life a little longer, produce your many children, guide your household, share man's burden with him, peace or war, till in a new social condition you pass without enervation or degeneration to new labours, and to a companionship with man in new and intellectual fields of toil. Do not, we beg of you, believe that, when you wear a French bonnet and have an eighteen-inch waist or trip to tennis in patent shoes, you have come any nearer to grasping the good, the true, or the beautiful that may be embedded in our nineteenth-century civilization. Feel no shame, we pray you, for that strong capacious form of yours; from that strong untrammelled body of yours shall yet spring a race strong to do or dare, such as grows not beneath the waistband of an enervated parasitic womanhood. "Tante, wait for us, we are coming; you have something to teach us, we have something to teach you; and it may be that when we have met and joined hands we will work out something fairer and better for our people and the world than has often been. Only do not decay from your ancient simplicity of living and toiling before the time is ripe and you can move forward to new labours. It would have been better that you should have fallen in your early conflicts with savages and beasts, and that nothing were left of you now but a name and a heap of stones on the African plains, than that you should absorb the diseases of an enervated and voluptuous modern womanhood--for then you would only have died and not rotted.