t, forgetting that she had once
tried this plan with disastrous results and had returned to the
allowance system with relief. Most men, she felt, were tyrannical and
arbitrary by nature, especially in money matters, or as she sometimes
called her husband,--"Turks." She often discussed the relation of the
sexes in marriage with Hazel Fredericks, who had "modern" views and
leant her books on the woman movement and suffrage. Although she
instinctively disliked "strong-minded women," she felt there was great
injustice in the present situation between men and women. "It is a
man's-world," became one of her favorite axioms. She could not deny that
her husband was kind,--she often boasted of his generosity to her
friends,--and she knew that he spent very little on his own pleasures:
whatever there was the family had it. But it always humiliated her to go
to him for money, when she was behind, and in his sterner moods try to
coax it from him. This was the way women had always been forced to do
with their masters, and it was, of course, all wrong: it classed the
wife with "horrid" women, who made men pay them for their complaisance.

Ideas on all these subjects were in the air: all the women Milly knew
talked of the "dawn of the woman era," the coming emancipation of the
sex from its world-old degradation. Milly vaguely believed it would mean
that every woman should have her own check-book and not be accountable
to any man for what she chose to spend. She amplified this point of view
to Reinhard, who liked "the little Bragdons" and often came to their new
home. Milly especially amused him in his role of student of the coming
sex. He liked to see her experiment with ideas and mischievously
encouraged her "revolt" as he called it. They had tea together, took
walks in the Park, and sometimes went to concerts. He was very kind to
them both, and Milly regarded him as their most influential friend. She
felt that the novelist would make a very good husband, understanding as
he did so thoroughly the woman's point of view.

"I'm not a 'new woman,' of course," Milly always concluded her
discourse.

"Of course you're not!" the novelist heartily concurred. "That's why you
are so interesting,--you represent an almost extinct species,--just
woman."

"I know I'm old-fashioned--Hazel always says so. I believe in men doing
the voting and all that. Women should not try to be like men--their
strength is their difference!"

"You want just to