And we may shudder, but we may not draw back. It is by way of the _place de la morte_, that women are moving inexorably to-day into industry and commerce and the professions, on to strange new destinies that shall not be denied. There on the firing line a bullet whizzes straight to the mark. A man drops dead in the trenches. Some wife’s husband, some girl’s sweetheart who before he was a soldier was a wage earner, never will be more. Back home another woman who had been temporarily enrolled in the ranks of industry, steps forward, enlisted for life in the army of labour. Dear God, what a price to pay for the freedom the feminists have asked. But this is not our woman movement. This is His woman movement, who moves in mysterious ways His ends to command. We may not know. And we do not understand. But as we watch the war clouds, we see, as it were in the lightning flash of truth, the illuminated way that is opening for women throughout the world. It is westward to us that this star of opportunity has taken its course directly from above the battlefields of Europe. A WOMAN OF YESTERDAY LOOKS ON Women Wanted! Women Wanted! I am hearing it again over there. Outside the windows of my London hotel in Piccadilly, a shaft of sharp white light played against the blackness of the London sky. Down these beams that searched the night for enemy Zeppelins, a woman’s figure softly moved. And as I looked, the close drawn curtains of my room, it seemed, parted and she stepped lightly across the window sill. She was gowned in a quaint, old-time costume. “They’re not wearing them to-day,” I smiled. She looked down at her cotton gown stamped with the broad arrows of Holloway jail. There were women, you know, who suffered and died in that prison garb. The way of the broad arrow used to be the way of the cross for the woman’s cause. “You ought to see the new styles,” I said. “Governments are getting out so many new decorations for women.” “Tell me,” she answered. “Up in heaven we have heard that it is so. And I have come to see.” So we went out together, the Soul of a Suffragette and I, to look on the Great Push of the new woman movement that is swinging down the twentieth century in sweeping battalions. It has the middle of the road and all the gates ahead are open wide. No ukase of parliament or king halts it. No church dogma anathematises it. No social edict ostracises it. The police do not arrest it and the hooligans do not mob it. No, indeed! The applauding populace that’s crying “_Place aux dames_” would not tolerate any such treatment as that. And in fact, I don’t think there’s any one left in the world who would want to so much as pull out a hairpin of this triumphant processional.