Other reasons, too, there are for the supplanting of the harp by its more stolid half-brother, the piano—bigger brother, a noisier, more assertive one, and a magnificent stop-gap for the creaking pauses of the drawing-room machinery. And how nobly it covers thin talk with a dense mantle of crackling tones! A provoker of speech, an urger to after-dinner eloquence, the piano will be remembered in the hereafter as the greatest social implement of last century’s latter half. Liszts in petticoats have been so numerous during the past twenty-five years as to escape classification. It was the girl who did not play that was singled out as an oddity. For one Sonia Kovalesky and her rare mastery of mathematics there were a million slaves of the ivory. Not even the sewing-machine routed the piano, though it dealt it a dangerous body blow. Treadles and pedals are not so far asunder, and a neat piano technique has been found quite useful by the ardent typewriter. What this present generation of children has to be especially thankful for is its immunity from useless piano practice. Unless there is discovered a sharply defined aptitude, a girl is kept away from the stool and pedals. Instead of the crooked back—in Germany known as the piano back—and relentless technical studies, our young woman golfs, cycles, rows, runs, fences, dances, and pianolas! While she once wearied her heart playing Gottschalk, she now plays tennis, and she freely admits that tennis is greater than Thalberg. Recall the names of all the great women’s colleges, recall their wonderful curriculums, and note with unprejudiced eyes their scope and the comparatively humble position occupied by music. In a word, I wish to point out that piano-playing as an accomplishment is passing. Girls play the piano as a matter of course when they have nimble fingers and care for it. Life has become too crowded, too variously beautiful, for a woman without marked musical gifts to waste it at the piano.