This is for the feminine mind the besetting temptation most difficult to avoid. Can we give up our “darning” and all of the habits of domesticity which the word connotes? It is the question which women face the world over to-day. Success beckons now along the broad highway of commerce. But the difficult details of living detain us on the way to fame or fortune. And we’ve got to cut the apron-strings that tie us to yesterday if we would go ahead. Which shall it be, new woman or old? Most of us either in business or the professions cannot be both. Dr. Ella Flagg Young, widely known as the first woman to so arrive at the top of her profession as Superintendent of Schools in the city of Chicago, received a salary of $10,000 a year. She had made it the inviolable rule of her life to live as comfortably as a man. She told me that she did not permit her mind to be distracted from her work for any of the affairs of less moment that she could hire some one else to attend to. She did not so much as buy her own gloves. Her housekeeper-companion attended to all of her shopping. And never, she said, even when she was a $10 a week school teacher, had she darned her own stockings! * * * * * There are a few women who have, it is true, managed to achieve success in spite of the handicap of domestic duties. But they must be women of exceptional physique to stand the strain. I know a business woman in New York who, at the head of a department of a great life insurance company, enjoys an income of $20,000 a year. Yet that woman still does up with her own hands all of the preserves that are used in her household. Her husband, who is a physician with a most lucrative practice, you will note doesn’t do preserves. He wouldn’t if the family never had them.