he comment and criticism of other
interested members have been brought out--of some, perhaps, whose interest
she had never before suspected, then she will feel a fresh impulse to
search for new accounts and to devour them. There is no longer anything
perfunctory about the matter. She can no longer even trust the labour of
looking up her references to others. She becomes an investigator; she
feels something of the joy of those who add to the sum of human knowledge.

And lo! the problem of clubwomen's reading is solved! The wandering mind
is captured; the inane residuum is abolished by union with the rest to
form a normal, intelligent whole. No more idiotic questions, no more
cyclopaedia-copying, no more wool-gathering programmes. Is it too much to
expect? Alas, we are but mortal!

I trust it has been made sufficiently clear that I think meanly neither of
the intellectual ability of women nor of the services of women's clubs.
The object of these papers is to give the former an opportunity to assert
itself, and the latter a chance to profit by the assertion. The woman's
club of the future should be a place where original ideas, fed and
directed by interested reading, are exchanged and discussed. Were I
writing of men's clubs, I should point out to them the same goal. And
then, perhaps, we may look forward to a time when a selected group of men
and women may come together and talk of things in which they both, as men
and women, are interested.

When this happens, I trust that in the discussion we shall not heed the
advice of some modern feminists and forget that we are as God made us. Why
should each man talk to a woman "as if she were another man"? I never
heard it advised that each woman should talk to each man "as if he were
another woman"; but I should resent it if I did. Why shut our eyes to the
truth? I trust that I have not been talking to the club-women "as if they
were men"; I am sure I have not meant to do so. They are not men; they
have their own ways, and those ways should be developed and encouraged. We
have had the psychology of race, of the crowd and of the criminal; where
is the investigator who has studied the Psychology of Woman? When she
(note the pronoun) has arrived, let us make her president of a woman's
club.

It is with diffidence that I have outlined any definite procedure,
because, after all, the precise manner in which the treatment should be
applied will depend, of course, on the club concerne