day. Will another decadence follow? The future alone can tell, and no prophetic sibyl has read the secret of that future. Possibly it will depend largely upon the poise and sanity of women themselves. SALON AND WOMAN’S CLUB [Illustration: Decorative image] · New Mania for Knowledge · · Women’s Clubs as Central Points · · Parallel between the Literary Salon and the Woman’s Club · · French and American Women · · Attitude of Anglo-Saxon Men toward Women · · Puritan Gospel of Feminine Liberty · · The Woman’s Club not a School of Manners · · Its Moral Value · · Its Social and Intellectual Value · · Imitation Culture · · Special Distinction of American Women · · Their Foibles · · Multiplication of Clubs · · Warning in the Excesses of the Later Salons · · Tendency to Separate Men and Women · · The Charm of Social Life · · Wisdom of Consulting the Past · [Illustration: Decorative image] I It is not too much to say that the entire present generation of women is going to school. Infancy cultivates its mind in the kindergarten, while the woman of threescore seeks consolation and diversion in clubs or a university course, instead of resigning herself to seclusion and prayers, or the chimney-corner and knitting, after the manner of her ancestors. Even our amusements carry instruction in solution. Childhood takes in knowledge through its toys and games; the débutante discusses Plato or Coquelin in the intervals of the waltz; youth and maturity alike find their pleasure in papers, talks, plays, music, and recitations. In these social menus everything is included, from a Greek drama or an Oriental faith to Wagner and the latest theory of economics. We have Kipling at breakfast, Rostand or Maeterlinck at luncheon, and the new Utopia at dinner. After a brilliant day of being adored and talked about, Browning has been duly labeled and put away, but Homer classes and Dante classes still alternate with lectures on the Impressionists or the Decadents. In this rage for knowledge, science and philosophy are not forgotten. Fashion ranges the field from occultism to agnosticism, from the qualities of a microbe to the origin of man. To-day it searches the problems of this world, to-morrow the mysteries of the next. There is nothing too large or too abstruse for the eager, questioning spirit that seeks to know all things, or at least to skim the surface of all things. Nor is this energetic pursuit of intelligence confined to towns or cities. Go into the remote village or hamlet, and you will find the inevitable club, where the merits of the last novel, the labor problem, the political situation, the silver question, the Boer war, and the state of the universe generally, are canvassed by a circle of women as freely, and with as keen a zest, as the virtues and shortcomings of their neighbors were talked over by their grandmothers--possibly may be still by a few of their benighted contemporaries.