r of England's history, there was only one
good-looking woman in the entire army--Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence--and
militant extravagances soon became too much for her. There were
intelligent women galore, women of the aristocracy born with a certain
style, and showing their breeding even on the soap-box, but sexually
attractive women never, and even the youngest seemed to have been born
without the bloom of youth. The significance of this, however, works
both ways. If men did not want them, at least there was something both
noble and pitiful in their willingness to sacrifice those dreams and
hopes which are the common heritage of the lovely and the plain, the
old and the young, the Circe and the Amazon, to the ultimate freedom
of those millions of their sisters lulled or helpless in the enchanted
net of sex.

It is doubtful if even the militants can revert to their former
singleness of purpose; after many months, possibly years, of devotion
to duty, serving State and man, the effacement of self, appreciation
of the naked fact that the integrity of their country matters more
than anything else on earth, they may be quite unable to rebound to
their old fanatical attitude toward suffrage as the one important
issue of the Twentieth Century. Even the very considerable number of
those women that have reached an appearance which would eliminate them
from the contest over such men as are left may be so chastened by the
hideous sufferings they have witnessed or heard of daily, so moved by
the astounding endurance and grim valor of man (who nearest approaches
to godhood in time of war) that they will have lost the disposition to
tear from him the few compensations the new era of peace can offer. If
that is the case, if women at the end of the war are soft, completely
rehabilitated in that femininity, or femaleness, which was their
original endowment from Nature, the whole great movement will subside,
and the work must begin over again by unborn women and their
accumulated grievances some fifty years hence.

Nothing is more sure than that Nature will take advantage of the lull
to make a desperate attempt to recover her lost ground. Progressive
women, and before the war their ranks were recruited daily, were one
of the most momentous results of the forces of the higher
civilization, an evolution that in Nature's eye represented a
lamentable divergence from type. Here is woman, with all her physical
disabilities, become man's rival in a