Every period grafts some special types of woman on to the Eternal Feminine, and Mrs. Neuralys represents quite a special type of the present. She is a very complex and not easily comprehended creature, and since it has lately become the fashion to describe anything that seems to elude ordinary classification as _fin-de-siècle_, I suppose I must regard Mrs. Neuralys as a _fin-de-siècle_ woman. Certainly she has no counterpart in the pages of Jane Austen or Miss Mitford, and if we would find any approach to her prototype in fiction, we must look to the works of the later “realists.” She is perfectly conscious of this; in fact, she studies that it shall be so, and acts up to it with picturesque effect. And “there’s the rub.” One is constantly led to suspect, by some little unconscious incongruous touch of naturalism, that she is only acting the part of the Emancipated Woman, that she is only playing at what she has read and talked about, that after all there is an artificial ring in this advanced development of womanhood, as represented by Mrs. Neuralys. Not that I discredit in any way the advancing condition of women, the greater freedom, mental, moral and social, that they are gradually and justly assuming as their right. But I always find that they take an exaggerated view of their emancipation; to prove their independence they begin to shatter idols and scoff at sacred things, after the manner of all revolutionists. Yet though they consider their emancipation demands that they shall at least affect to regard children as intolerable nuisances and husbands as merely useful appendages to their own lives and quite irrelevant to their romances, only let a child of theirs be ill, or a lover give cause for jealousy, and it is the unemancipated, the real woman that will reveal herself in all her elemental femininity.