became enamoured of rinking and archery and
galloping along the Brighton Parade. Swiftly they have sped on since
then from horror to horror. The invasion of the tennis-courts and of the
golf-links, the seizure of the bicycle and of the typewriter, were
but steps preliminary in that campaign which is to end with the final
victorious occupation of St. Stephen's. But stay! The horrific pioneers
of womanhood who gad hither and thither and, confounding wisdom with the
device on her shield, shriek for the unbecoming, are doomed. Though they
spin their bicycle-treadles so amazingly fast, they are too late. Though
they scream victory, none follow them. Artifice, that fair exile, has
returned.

Yes, though the pioneers know it not, they are doomed already. For of
the curiosities of history not the least strange is the manner in which
two social movements may be seen to overlap, long after the second has,
in truth, given its death-blow to the first. And, in like manner, as one
has seen the limbs of a murdered thing in lively movement, so we need
not doubt that, though the voices of those who cry out for reform be
very terribly shrill, they will soon be hushed. Dear Artifice is with
us. It needed but that we should wait.

Surely, without any of my pleading, women will welcome their great and
amiable protectrix, as by instinct. For (have I not said?) it is upon
her that all their strength, their life almost, depends. Artifices first
command to them is that they should repose. With bodily activity their
powder will fly, their enamel crack. They are butterflies who must not
flit, if they love their bloom. Now, setting aside the point of view of
passion, from which very many obvious things might be said (and probably
have been by the minor poets), it is, from the intellectual point of
view, quite necessary that a woman should repose. Hers is the resupinate
sex. On her couch she is a goddess, but so soon as ever she put her foot
to the ground--ho, she is the veriest little sillypop, and quite done
for. She cannot rival us in action, but she is our mistress in the
things of the mind. Let her not by second-rate athletics, nor indeed
by any exercise soever of the limbs, spoil the pretty procedure of her
reason. Let her be content to remain the guide, the subtle suggester
of what we must do, the strategist whose soldiers we are, the little
architect whose workmen.

'After all,' as a pretty girl once said to me, 'women are a sex by
them