alcohol and using meaningless expletives and telling sexual stories. Even in physical strength and athletic skill the sexes are approaching; nor does one find any loss of charm or grace in some of the finest women athletes.
These changes are proceeding, and, apart from inevitable errors and excesses, on which caricaturists fasten with their genial unscrupulousness, the result is promising. Contemporary expressions of alarm are often ludicrous. Thousands of ladies who are horrified at the emergence of “a new sex” are themselves contriving, by means which would have caused their prolific grandmothers to raise white hands to heaven, to limit their families to two children. We take our reform in small doses, as if complete social health were a thing to be considered very seriously. Yet if one patiently traces in imagination the effect of all these changes on the womanhood of the race, one foresees a generation of women which recalls Shelley’s lines:
"And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind
As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew
On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms,
From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure;
Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel,
And changed to all which once they dared not be,
Yet, being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride,
Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill-shame,
The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,
Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.”
Grant the poet his licence; women are not more
