th greater equanimity.

At this late day--when seventeen years have rolled by since Ibsen's "The
Doll's House" was first introduced to an English-speaking audience at
the Novelty Theatre in London--it is surely not necessary to dwell upon
the dwarfing and stifling effects upon women of even "happy" homes. In
the brilliant preface to "Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant," Bernard Shaw,
referring to middle-class home life, speaks of "the normal English way
being to sit in separate families in separate rooms in separate houses,
each person silently occupied with a book, a paper, or a game of halma,
cut off equally from the blessings of society and solitude." "The
result," he continues, "is that you may make the acquaintance of a
thousand streets of middle-class English families without coming on a
trace of any consciousness of citizenship, or any artistic cultivation
of the senses."

In the following paragraph he adds:

"In proportion as this horrible domestic institution is broken up by the
active social circulation of the upper classes in their own orbit, or
its stagnant isolation made impossible by the overcrowding of the
working classes, manners improve enormously. In the middle classes
themselves the revolt of a single clever daughter (nobody has yet done
justice to the modern clever Englishwoman's loathing of the very word
'home'), and her insistence on qualifying herself for an independent
working life, humanizes her whole family in an astonishingly short time;
and the formation of a habit of going to the suburban theatre once a
week, or to the Monday Popular Concerts, or both, very perceptibly
ameliorates its manners. But none of these breaches in the Englishman's
castle-house can be made without a cannonade of books and pianoforte
music. The books and music cannot be kept out, because they alone can
make the hideous boredom of the hearth bearable. If its victims may not
live real lives, they may at least read about imaginary ones, and
perhaps learn from them to doubt whether a class that not only submits
to home life, but actually values itself on it, is really a class worth
belonging to. For the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home, then,
let my plays be printed as well as acted."

A concrete picture may give us a better idea of what Shaw means when he
calls women "the unhappy prisoners of the home." In that magnificent
scene in the third act of "Candida," after Morell has called on Candida
to choose between