the
world with too much higher things?

May there not, by the time all bothers have been removed from woman's
path, be too many amateur violinists in the world, too many
skirt-dancers, too much poker work? If not, what are they? these "higher
things," for which so many women are demanding twenty-four hours a day
leisure. I want to know.

One lady of my acquaintance is a Poor Law Guardian and secretary to a
labour bureau. But then she runs a house with two servants, four
children, and a husband, and appears to be so used to bothers that she
would feel herself lost without them. You can do this kind of work
apparently even when you are bothered with a home. It is the
skirt-dancing and the poker work that cannot brook rivalry. The modern
woman has begun to find children a nuisance; they interfere with her
development. The mere man, who has written his poems, painted his
pictures, composed his melodies, fashioned his philosophies, in the midst
of life's troubles and bothers, grows nervous thinking what this new
woman must be whose mind is so tremendous that the whole world must be
shut up, so to speak, sent to do its business out of her sight and
hearing, lest her attention should be distracted.

An optimistic friend of mine tells me not to worry myself; tells me that
it is going to come out all right in the end. Woman just now, he
contends, is passing through her college period. The school life of
strict surveillance is for ever done with. She is now the young
Freshwoman. The bothering lessons are over, the bothering schoolmaster
she has said good-bye to. She has her latchkey and is "on her own."
There are still some bothering rules about being in at twelve o'clock,
and so many attendances each term at chapel. She is indignant. This
interferes with her idea that life is to be one long orgie of
self-indulgence, of pleasure. The college period will pass--is passing.
Woman will go out into the world, take her place there, discover that
bothers were not left behind in the old schoolhouse, will learn that life
has duties, responsibilities, will take up her burden side by side with
man, will accomplish her destiny.

Is there anything left for her to learn?

Meanwhile, however, she is having a good time--some people think too good
a time. She wants the best of both. She demands the joys of
independence together with freedom from all work--slavery she calls it.
The servants are not to be allowed to bo