es, God bless 'em--and curb 'em--are not built
that way. A woman wedded to a cause is divorced from all else. She
resents the bare thought that in the press of matters and the clash of
worlds, mankind should for one moment turn aside from her pet cause to
concern itself with newer issues and wider motives. From a devotee she
soon is transformed into a habitee. From being an earnest advocate she
advances--or retrogrades--to the status of a plain bore. To be a common
nuisance is bad enough; to be a common scold is worse, and presently she
turns scold and goes about railing shrilly at a world that criminally
persists in thinking of other topics than the one which lies closest to
her heart and loosest on her tongue.

Than a woman who is a scold there is but one more exasperating shape of
a woman and that is the woman who, not content with being the most
contradictory, the most paradoxical, the most adorable of the Almighty's
creations--to wit, a womanly woman--tries, among men, to be a good
fellow, so-called.

But that which is ordinarily a fault may, on occasion of extraordinary
stress, become the most transcendent and the most admirable of virtues.
I think of this last war and of the share our women and the women of
other lands have played in it. No one caviled nor complained at the
one-ideaness of womankind while the world was in a welter of woe and
slaughter. Of all that they had, worth having, our women gave and gave
and gave and gave. They gave their sons and their brothers, their
husbands and their fathers, to their country; they gave of their time
and of their energies and of their talent; they gave of their wonderful
mercy and their wonderful patience, and their yet more wonderful
courage; they gave of the work of their hands and the salt of their
souls and the very blood of their hearts. For every suspected woman
slacker there were ten known men slackers--yea, ten times ten and ten to
carry.

Each day, during that war, the story of Mary Magdalene redeemed was
somewhere lived over again. Every great crisis in the war-torn lands
produced its Joan of Arc, its Florence Nightingale, its Clara Barton. To
the women fell the tasks which for the most part brought no public
recognition, no published acknowledgments of gratitude. For them,
instead of the palms of victory and the sheaves of glory, there were the
crosses of sacrifice, the thorny diadems of suffering. We cannot
conceive of men, thus circumstanced, going so f