But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back and stands again before the cottage rose bowered on the English downs, red roofed in France and Italy, blue trimmed in Germany or ikon blessed in Russia or white porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm’s length and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall see there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when he marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened to her since. It is woman’s coming of age. Look, she is turning the ring on her finger to-day. When the man in khaki went away, that ring was sign and symbol of the status assigned to her by all the oldest law books and religious books of the world. And none of the modern ones had been able wholly to eradicate from their pages the point of view that was the most prevailing opinion of civilisation. The most ancient classification of all listed in one category “a man’s house and his wife, his man servant and his maidservant, his ox and his ass and any other possessions that are his.” An English state church has given her in marriage to him “to obey him and serve him.” A German state church has bound her “to be subject to him as to her lord and master.” Christian lands have agreed that a woman when she marries enters into a state of coverture by which they tell us “the husband hath power and dominion over his wife.” Religious teachers from St. Paul to Martin Luther, law givers from Moses to Napoleon have been unanimous on this point, which Napoleon framing his code for France summed up briefly, Woman belongs to man. This has been the basic assumption of church and state from whose courts of authority each concession of individuality for woman has been won only by process of slow amendment. It is still so subtly interwoven in dogma and statute that there is not yet any land where a woman, though thinking herself free, may not trip against a legal disability that has not yet been dislodged. For Blackstone, the great authority of reference, declares “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated in that of the husband.” And all over the world, all the church councils and all the state courts have not yet been so reformed but that by reversion to type they will hark back to the pronouncement. Man and wife are one—and he is the one. So the man’s mind thinketh.