Her own country turned on her coldly with the declaration, His people are your people. And nowhere in the world would she be so little welcome as among his people now at war with and bitterly hostile to hers. There are instances where these women have been obliged to find refuge in neutral countries. In some lands they have been permitted to remain in the place of their birth, but under police espionage. A man and his wife, you know, are one. And if he controls her absolutely, from her slippers to her principles, is it likely that she will dare to be a free agent in her war sympathies? As a matter of fact, this war has developed that she is always more or less under the cold suspicion even of relatives and neighbours, of having along with the loss of her own nationality lost also her patriotism. Who shall say but that in obedience to her husband she may be a spy? I stood at the desk in the Bow Street Police Station registering my arrival in London one war day, when a timid voice of inquiry at my side also addressed the sergeant: “I want to ask,” she said diffidently, “if I could possibly have my mail sent here to police headquarters? You see, it’s letters from my husband interned here in England because he’s a German. I’m an English woman. But every boarding house in London where I try to live, as soon as that envelope marked ‘Enemy Internment Camp’ arrives in my mail, turns me out.” Like this, the “alien wife” has to be shunted about in many lands to-day. Even a woman who has not so lost her nationality may not travel without all of the credentials of her marital status to establish it. If you apply for a passport at Washington, you are asked for your husband’s birth certificate and under some conditions your marriage certificate. A married man is not asked for his. Why this inquiry into your personal affairs? Because it is tacitly assumed that you are so under the authority of another person that there is no knowing what he may make you do. By all law and religion you have been taught to obey him. Then if he told you to blow up a ship, would you? The only way to make sure that you are a “safe” person to be at large, is to make sure of your husband’s loyalty. For your identity is not your own, you see, it’s his. If he happens to be French or Russian or German or Hottentot, so you must be. WOMAN’S COMING OF AGE