d despair by others when the
curtain had rung down and they could relax the proud and smiling front
they presented to the world. Not one would have had her son shirk his
duty, nor asked for compromise with the enemy, but all prayed for the
war to end. It is true that these men at the front are heroes in the
eyes of their women, worshiped by the majority when they come home
briefly as permissionnaires, and it is also true that France is an old
military nation and that the brain-cells of its women are full of
ancestral memories of war. But never before have women done as much
thinking for themselves as they are doing to-day, as they had done for
some fifteen or twenty years before the war. That war has now lasted
almost three years. During this long and terrible period there has
been scarcely a woman in France, as in Britain, Russia, Italy,
Germany, who has not done her share behind the lines, working, at her
self-appointed tasks or at those imposed by the Government, for months
on end without a day of rest. They have had contacts that never would
have approached them otherwise, they have been obliged to think for
themselves, for thousands of helpless poor, for the men at the Front.
The Frenchwomen particularly have forced men to deal with them as
human beings and respect them as such, dissipating in some measure
those mists of sex through which the Frenchman loves to stalk in
search of the elusive and highly-sophisticated quarry. As long as a
woman was sexually attractive she could never hope to meet man on an
equal footing, no matter how entrancing he might find her mental
qualities. She must play hide-and-seek, exercise finesse, seduction,
keep the flag of sex flying ever on the ramparts. It is doubtful if
Frenchmen will change in this respect, but it is more than doubtful if
women do not.

There is hardly any doubt that if this war lasts long enough women for
the first time in the history of civilization will have it in their
power to seize one at least of the world's reins. But will they do
it--I am now speaking of women in mass, not of the advanced thinkers,
or of women of the world who have so recently ascertained that there
is a special joy in being free of the tyranny of sex, a tyranny that
emanated no less from within than without.

It is to be imagined that all the men who are fighting in this most
trying of all wars are heroes in the eyes of European women--as well
they may be--and that those who survive are