310 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



vance of decency, sanitation, a modicum of comfort, with its garden 

 and its allotment attached, enabling occupiers to provide for the 

 various necessaries of life. 



However all this does not by itself make up a " home," and 

 " homes," as already insisted, we must have. And it is essentially 

 woman's part to make them. 



Woman has lately — after a struggle, the incidents of which one 

 would now wish to be able to forget — come into her own. For her the 

 world has become changed. The change is very noticeable in towns, 

 where in the streets you see— and feel by frequent bodily shocks — 

 girls and women bustling, hustling, jostling and trudging to their 

 several avocations in broad phalanges, or else gathering in obstructive 

 clusters impeding locomotion. Tired of the long rule of the pro- 

 verbial s'habiller, babiller et se deshabiller as the day's programme, 

 they have taken to active occupation, invading, like an inverted 

 Mnesilochus, the sanctum of the other sex, smoking, and pouring 

 in their thousands into man's previous special preserves, claiming a 

 share in all his occupations — save that of preparing for active fighting 

 — struggling energetically for Portia's gown, and, undeterred by the 

 rather warning example of Korah, " seeking the priesthood also " — 

 in order, apparently, that there may be at any rate two long-clothes 

 occupations among so many barely kilted. For otherwise, turning 

 from these imitatresses of ancient Lysistrata and Peaxagora, the 

 modern " Graces " — who evidently credit those who behold them 

 with the opinion expressed by the famous Lord Chesterfield in one 

 of his " Letters to his Son," when, speaking about the judgment of 

 Paris, pour bien juger, il faut tout voir — the exposure of that which, 

 in Sterne's words, " is generally concealed " — but, as he adds, " in 

 all innocence " — has proceeded to such a pitch as to make one specu- 

 late how long it will be before, from this modern substitute of the 

 chitbn schistos, we shall arrive at the classical Inter ludentes nuda 

 puella viros of ancient Sparta. 



In the country conditions " over which man has no control " have 

 cruelly, or else mercifully, interposed an obstacle to such sex- 

 obliterating development — and with it happily of the rather alarming 

 effects of that development upon family relations. You will not, 

 in the healthy atmosphere of the country, find a very reverend dean 

 openly pleading for a practice — avowedly for the sake of " marital 

 peace " — from which even heathen Zenobia shrank in horror, finding 

 it, moreover, wholly unnecessary for the said purpose. 



The country, indeed, offers even greater scope for female activity 

 than the town, but with this difference, that it keeps it fully feminine, 



