I cannot say that Mrs. Neuralys belongs to the strong-minded sections of the Emancipated Sisterhood; she stumps no platforms and professes no mission; she sets herself no philanthropic task; she has adopted no vocation, unless it be that of living so as to best please Mrs. Reuben Neuralys. She cultivates a kind of world-weariness, and professes to be hopelessly oppressed by custom. She is bored by everything in which her foremothers were wont to take pleasure. The ruling passion of her life is novelty of sensation, and in seeking this she is utterly without conscience. No consideration of conventionality can restrain her in the pursuit of a new experience in emotion; no respect for tradition has weight with her to restrict any experiment in sentiment or sensibility. Anything that produces new psychical or sensuous effects upon her is welcomed, irrespective of Mrs. Grundy, the Ten Commandments, or Mrs. Lynn Linton. Whether it be a new religion, a new social environment, a new specific for neuralgia, to which she is of course a martyr, a new personality to love and be loved by, a new artistic cult, she will make for it with unbridled eagerness, no matter what social or other susceptibility she may shock in the accomplishment. I believe that she really enjoys the sense of novelty, though I shrewdly suspect that she affects many fancies and pretends many enthusiasms merely because she thinks that not to do so would be “conventional.” [Illustration] This word “conventional” is the bogie of her life, she is so afraid of it that she will run into any extravagance to escape its application. It is her own pet term of contempt—that and “suburban.” I believe she herself would rather be called improper than suburban. To her mind, conscious, of course, of its own innocence, there might be something piquant in being thought improper; it might lead to new experiences of other people’s real characters, shed side-lights on the world of men and women, and pluck for her the heart of many mysteries. For this reason she affects exceptional freedom of speech and licence of subject, and she expresses no anger, or only smiles, whenever mischievous persons couple her name with that of any man who may be openly admiring her at the moment, and whose escort to places of public resort she may constantly accept,—for of course, being an emancipated woman, it would be altogether too “suburban” to be seen about with her husband. Indeed she appears to deem it a point of honour, and an obligation due to the end of the century, to let it be clearly understood that her husband bores her, and that no sympathy of any kind exists between them. And certain of her friends, and I am told many wives of most affectionate disposition, consider that no self-respecting husband outside Peckham Rye and its like would wish it otherwise.