Poor Dr. Hearthside, he never bargained for all this aggressive domesticity; but then, poor Mrs. Hearthside, she began married life with aspirations of a very different character. Her ideals are shattered, she has drifted into the purely domestic woman, simply because she married a man who misunderstood her, or rather who did not try to understand her at all after marriage. Women are very malleable creatures; Mrs. Hearthside might have been an ideal wife with another husband. As it is, to the many who see her only as she is now, she is simply an uninteresting specimen of a very common type—the domestic woman. Her soul is really only sleeping; let us hope that it will quite awaken again, when her daughters dawn into womanhood and her sons into manhood. Then her life will have new scope, and her own experience will stand them both in good stead. Will she strive that her daughters become not of this same type? Perhaps Mrs. Hearthside is happy in her way. Perhaps she considers her own state more enviable than that of a hopeless bachelor—like me, for instance. And perhaps it is; for in children we may live again. They are the resurrection of dead dreams, unfulfilled ambitions, and lost hopes. The domestic woman has this consolation, and so she has the better of us “who have free souls”—but no children. _A MODERN LADY-NOVELIST_ In the olden days, when fighting was the principal business of men, and the womenfolk had nought to do but stay at home and wait for the return of their lords, all feminine imagination, stimulated by the songs of minstrels, found vent in the weaving of storied tapestries or silken scarves for the warriors. But in these later days of peace and commerce and culture, when wives are individuals, and not merely rated among their husband’s personal effects, and the measured roll of the printing press is the voice of the civilised world, the imaginative woman wields the pen, and leaves the needle and the bodkin to her humbler-minded sisters. So we have the lady-novelist, who is really the most important and productive type of literary woman. But, when all is said and done, the ordinary lady-novelist, who turns out her three volumes in accordance with the stereotyped taste of the novel-reading _clientèle_ of the circulating libraries, is scarcely much more interesting as a personality than the fashionable _modiste_ who composes her costumes to suit the taste of her customers.