even if there be a spiral tendency upward, as the optimists amiably assure us. Doubtless we fancy ourselves much wiser than those seventeenth-century précieuses whose imitators did them so much harm. Certainly we put more seriousness into our pretensions. But we have our own little faults and affectations, though they are not precisely the same. We do not devote ourselves to portraits, or sonnets, or madrigals. We do not moralize in maxims, good or bad, nor do we pretend to be sentimental; indeed, we pretend not to be, if we are. Sentiment is out of fashion. The modern Philaminte may look with chilling pity upon her belated sister who has the courage to like Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, when she ought to prefer Ibsen and the symbolists; but she is not likely to faint at a common word, or dismiss her cook for a solecism. Our foibles are of quite another sort. Instead of painting little pictures on a small canvas, we take a very large canvas and pad our pictures to fit it. We do not map out the passions on a _carte du tendre_, or give our valuable time to the discussion of a high-flown Platonism which cradles a woman in rose-leaves, while her lover waits for her a dozen years or so because it is vulgar to marry; but we map out the fields of the intellect, extending from protoplasm to the fixed stars, and undertake to traverse the whole as confidently as we start for a morning walk. If we cannot get over the ground fast enough, we can take an electric train and catch flying glimpses sufficient to give us a pleasant consciousness of being intelligent and quite modern. Such vast aims are, no doubt, praiseworthy, and reflect great credit on the clubs which have demonstrated so clearly the expansive quality of the feminine mind; but they are also fatiguing, and suggest the possibility that these same clubs are pushing us a little too fast and too far. One is often forced to the conclusion that we should do more if we did not try to do quite so much. It is very well to follow Emerson’s advice to “hitch your wagon to a star”; but he never proposed hitching it to all the constellations at once. When I hear the Greek poets, the Italian painters, the English novelists, and the German masters disposed of at a symposium in a single afternoon, as I did not long ago, I wonder if the rare quality of mental distinction which made the glory of the Immortals will exist at all in the future; whether we shall not build tents for our thoughts instead of temples; whether, indeed, the finest flavor of thought will not be as hopelessly lost as the perfume of the flowers that are scattered in indiscriminate heaps along the highways to show their quantity.