and ability to lie imperturbably in order to spare other people's feelings, particularly the feelings of their husbands and other male dependents. But Rose Macaulay rejects "tact." Her intelligence has no reservations. She looks at me without gloves. To the brutal frankness which is English she adds a hard, realistic thrust which is feminine—the special characteristic, it seems, of the full-fledged feminine Intellectual.
Once started on logical courses, women, I surmise, run through them faster than men. Consider the mad speed with which Rose Macaulay has run through the bright hopes of the feminist program. Her course was slowly prepared and her lamp was trimmed by such poor, old, patient plodders as Samuel Butler, G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Forty years it took these fumbling iconoclasts to get the Victorian candelabra thoroughly junked and the clean cinder path laid out for the Ann Veronicas of the present age. With "Potterism," 1920, Rose Macaulay caught up what for brevity we may call the Wellsian torch, and in four short years she burned it out and tossed us the charred wick in "Told by an Idiot."
If she had refrained from the race, who knows?—perhaps dear old Mr. Wells with his rich resources of erotic sentiment and his vast social hopefulness might have kept his beloved young people "forward-looking" for another ten years. As it is, Mr. Wells is collecting his works, and closing the great epoch of social expectation, while Rose Macaulay cynically explains to the now tittering young people that before they can get around to reform the world they themselves will be old, and then, of course, it will be useless to try to do anything about it.
