o-day she seemed to
attract more even than ordinary attention. Her personality, her
toilette, which was superb, and her companion, were all alike
interesting to the slowly moving throng of men and women amongst whom
they were threading their way. The attitude of her sex towards
Berenice was in a certain sense a paradox. She was distinctly the most
talented and the most original of all the "petticoat apostles," as the
very man who was now walking by her side had scornfully described the
little band of women writers who were accused of trying to launch upon
society a new type of their own sex. Her last novel was flooding all
the bookstalls; and if not of the day, was certainly the book of the
hour. She herself, known before only as a brilliant journalist writing
under a curious _nom de plume_, had suddenly become one of the most
marked figures in London life. Yet she had not gone so far as other
writers who had dealt with the same subject. Marriage, she had
dared to write, had become the whitewashing of the impure, the
sanctifying of the vicious! But she had not added the almost natural
corollary,--therefore let there be no marriage. On the contrary,
marriage in the ideal she had written of as the most wonderful and
the most beautiful thing in life,--only marriage in the ideal did
not exist.

She had never posed as a woman with a mission! She formulated nowhere
any scheme for the re-organization of those social conditions whose
bases she had very eloquently and very trenchantly held to be rotten
and impure. She had written as a prophet of woe! She had preached only
destruction, and from the first she had left her readers curious as to
what sexual system could possibly replace the old. The thing which
happened was inevitable. The amazing demand for her book was exactly
in inverse proportion to its popularity amongst her sex. The crusade
against men was well! Admittedly they were a bad lot, and needed to
be told of it. A little self-assertion on behalf of his superior was a
thing to be encouraged and applauded. But a crusade against marriage!
Berenice must be a most abandoned, as well as a most immoral, woman!
No one who even hinted at the doctrine of love without marriage could
be altogether respectable. Not that Berenice had ever done that.
Still, she had written of marriage,--the usual run of marriages,--from
a woman's point of view, as a very hateful thing. What did she
require, then, of her sex? To live and die old ma