The guest of honour was a woman playwright whose problem play was one of the successes of last season. She has just finished another. That was why she could be here to-night. While she writes, no dinner invitation can lure her from her desk. “You see, I just have to do my work in the evening,” she told us. “After midnight I write best. It’s the only time I am sure that no one will interrupt with the announcement that my cousin from the West is here, or the steam pipes have burst, or some other event has come to pass in a busy day.” We had struck the domestic chord. Over the coffee we discussed a book that has stirred the world with its profound contribution to the interpretation of the woman movement. The author easily holds a place among the most famous. We all know her public life. One who knew her home life, told us more. She wrote that book in the intervals of doing her own housework. The same hand that held her inspired pen, washed the dishes and baked the bread and wielded the broom at her house—and made all of her own clothes. It was necessary because her entire fortune had been swept away. Does any one know of a man who has made a profound contribution to literature the while he prepared three meals a day or in the intervals of his rest and recreation cut out and made, say, his own shirts? I met last year in London this famous woman who has compassed all of these tasks on her way to literary fame. She’s in a sanitarium trying to recuperate from nervous prostration. THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS The hand that knows how to stir with a spoon and to sew with a needle has got to forget its cunning if women are to live successfully and engage in business and the professions. The woman of the present generation has struggled to do her own work in the office and, after hours that of the woman of yesterday in the home. It’s two days’ work in one. It has been decided by the scientific experts, you remember, who found the women munition workers of England attempting this, that it cannot be done consistently with the highest efficiency in output. And the Trade Unions in industry endorse the decision. This is the critical hour for the new women in commerce to accept the same principle. I know it is difficult to adopt a man’s standard of comfortable living on two-thirds a man’s pay. And I know of no one to pin carnations in your buttonhole. But somehow the woman in business has got to conserve her energy and concentrate her force in bridging the distance that has in the past separated her from man’s pay. There is now the greatest chance that has ever come to her to achieve it—if she prepares herself by every means of self-improvement to perform equal work. Don’t darn. Go to the moving pictures even, instead.