Since the fatal day when our earliest ancestors left the Garden of Eden, when Adam digged and Eve span, there have been a million things that women were told they shouldn't attempt, that is, not without the penalty of losing their "womanliness," or interfering with their family duties. But they continued, did these same refractory females, to overcome obstacles, leap social hurdles, make mock of antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves as if they were free individuals, and not petticoated with absurd prejudices. They loved. They married. They became mothers. George Sand was in the vanguard of this small army of protestants against the prevailing moral code (for woman only). Her unhappy marriage was a blazing bonfire of revolt. The misunderstood woman at last had her innings. Sand stood for all that was wicked and hateful in the eyes of law and order. Yet, compared with the feminine fiction of our days, Sand's is positively idyllic. She is one parent of the Woman movement, unpalatable as her morals may prove to churchgoers. She acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urge others to do--and never attempt on their own account. George was brave. And George was polyandrous. If she hadn't much temperament, she had the courage to throw her bonnet over the windmill when she saw the man she liked, and if she suffered later, she, being an artist, made a literary asset of these sufferings. She is the true ancestor of the New Woman. Her books were considered so immoral by her generation that to be seen reading them was enough to damn a man. Other males, other tales. She dared "to live her own life," as the Ibsenites say, and she was the original Ibsen girl, proof-before-all-letters. I haven't the slightest doubt that to-day she would speak to street crowds, urging the vote for woman. Why shouldn't woman vote? she might be supposed to argue. There will be less dyspepsia in America when women desert the kitchen for the halls of legislation. Men, perforce, are better cooks. So, by all means, let woman vote. Will it not be an acid test applied to our alleged democratic institutions? George Sand believed herself to be a social-democrat. She trusted in Pierre Leroux's mysticism, trusted in the phalanstery of Fourier, in the doctrines of Saint-Simon, the latter especially because of her intimacy with Franz Liszt; nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation of ideas in our century, and, as she had a sensitive soul, modern democracy might prove for her a very delirium of ugliness. She was always æsthetic. She could portray with a tender pen the stammering litany of young caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her fiction. Her Indianas, Lélias, and the other romantic insurgents against society are Byronic, Laras in petticoats. All rose-water and rage, they are as rare in life as black lightning on a blue sky. Her stories are as sad and as ridiculous as a nightcap. IV