to get the most good
out of life. She is not simply endeavoring to kill time as she once
was. She is trying to live each day for itself. She is not living so
much in the to-morrows which never come. Having begun to earn her own
money, she is learning the value of her father's--a thing the American
father has been trying to teach her for fifty or a hundred years, but
she could not learn because she saw it come so easily and she let it
go so freely.

A man said to me not long ago, "What has got into the girls? Has it
become the fashion to economize? All the nicest girls I know are
talking of the value of money and of how much is wasted unthinkingly.
Are we poor bachelors to take courage and believe that we can afford
one of these beautiful luxuries in wives?"

Alas, it is anything but a hint to take courage; for this heavenly
phase of the new woman means that when she has learned that she can
support herself, so that in case her riches take wings she need not be
forced to drudge at uncongenial employment, or to marry for a home,
she will be more particular than ever in the kind of a man she
marries. For in fitting herself for marriage she is learning quite as
well the kind of husband she ought to have. And she will not be as apt
to marry a man on account of his clothes or because he dances divinely
as once she might have done.

I do not mean to say that the new woman will not marry. In point of
fact she will--if properly urged by the right man. But she will not
marry so early, so hurriedly, nor so ill-advisedly as before. And
therefore the men whom new women marry will do well to realize the
compliment of her choice; for it will mean that, according to her
light, he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting. Of
course the other women marry on that principle too. The only
difference between the new woman and her sisters is in the amount of
her light and the use she makes of it.

It is the man who marries the new woman who is going to get the most
out of this life; for even in living there is everything in knowing
how. And far from leaving man out of her problem in life, her
philosophy is teaching her to look for his possibilities with the same
anxiety that she employs in studying her own; that to adapt herself to
his individuality need not necessarily imperil her own; that the first
element in the forming of this perfect home which it is her ambition
to establish is perfect congeniality of spirit between