and an occasional night visit from her master, believing that her highest function is to bear sons, and wishing to know nothing of the life into which she is to send them-that woman is not real: she is a figment of the masculine imagination: she is a work of art—and as a work of art she has a certain dignity and beauty; but-"

"I hadn't thought of the Mohammedan woman as having any particular dignity," said Max.

"An Occidental," I suggested, "may fail to see the dignity of a Chinese play; but it is there for those who made it. And this Turkish tableau has its dignity too. For is not the whole Oriental system designed in a spirit of reverence for women as women? Because they are the sacred vessels of life, they must be set apart from the profane uses of the world. They must be housed by themselves, in a quiet to which the din of commerce and politics may not penetrate. And when their master comes to them after the sordid business of the day, he must not bring to them his tired thoughts, the stale echoes of his day's work, but only a tender and passionate appreciation of their loveliness. Such, I am assured by the authorities, is the real spirit of the male Turk. It is for her sake that she is confined in the harem, and made to veil her face when she walks abroad. For he knows the effect of her loveliness upon men's minds, and he wishes to shield her from the unlawful thoughts of men."

"The theory doesn't seem to work out very well," said Max, "according to Burton's 'Arabian Nights.'"

"It works about as well as any of the masculine theories about women. It works as well as the Medieval theory did. It is founded, at least, on fact the fact that a woman is a woman. It is true that in his reverence for her specifically sexual attributes the Turk loses sight of the fact that she is a human being. But the troubadour starts out with the assumption that she is not a human being at all, but an angel. Women have a certain aptitude which enables them to masquerade as merely females. But they must have had a hard time. play-acting at being angels.'

"Don't you suppose the men knew it was all playacting?" suggested Max.

"I wonder. It seems to me they took the play pretty seriously when they rode and reeled in clanging lists to prove their belief in her angelicalness. No, a man might be subject to ordinary human motives and impulses, but she—at least his own bright particular she-was more than human. Other women might be as wicked as any dame in the 'Decameron,' but she was so coldly chaste that she could walk unscathed over hot ploughshares to prove it if it became necessary."

"Yes," said Max with a shiver. "I remember a horribly realistic poem about that by John David

son.

His heroine walked over hot ploughshares, but not-not unscathed. . .

"She was human after all. No Turk would have put her to such a test. He would prefer to drop

her quietly into the Bosphorous, in a sack."

"Let's agree that the chivalric attitude toward women is crueler than the Turkish, and get on to something else. Where does the modern attitude toward woman come in?"

"She brings it with her," I replied. "That is the difference. The modern man does not have to invent something for the modern woman to be. She is what she is, and we adjust ourselves to her as well as we can.

At this moment the door of the office burst open, and an impetuous young woman entered.

"Hello!" she said. "Tell me, you two, what I'm to do. I've gone and made two different dinner dates for to-night!"

We put feminism from our minds and begged her to give us more data.

"One is to the Browns," she said. "There will be some interesting men there, and after dinner they will go off to the smoking-room and talk about all sorts of interesting things, leaving us women to ourselves. So I don't want to go.

Involuntarily I thought of the harem, that secluded world of women into which no breath of the interests of the larger world could penetrate, and

I smiled at what seemed a quaint survival of the Mohammedan tradition. That pleasant parlour of the Browns', with its group of laughing women waiting for their lords, changed subtly as I thought of it into the still precincts of the harem-fled from whence, and standing in trepidation upon our doorstep, was this defiant désenchantée.

The girl was speaking again. "The other engagement," she said, "is with a young man who has attached himself to me, and wants to take me to see 'The Merchant of Venice'-which I've seen at frequent intervals ever since I was eight years old. He insists that none of the other plays in town are 'nice.'" She smiled. "He has seen them all, and he knows.

"He

"He's such a funny boy," she continued. doesn't seem to realize that I'm free, white, and twenty-one. He's getting to be an awful nuisance with his notions of how I ought to behave. And see!" she held out a pair of gloved hands-"I've had to buy me a new pair of gloves: he took one home with him the other night, and wouldn't give it back."

There came to me a sudden vision of the lists, and of a proud young knight who carried, triumphant, through its dust and blood, her glove upon his helm. For her he rode and reeled-for her and for the ideal of feminine angelicalness. And then the scene faded and changed and I saw what

sickened my mind-the red-hot ploughshares waiting for her feet.

"Well," Max asked the girl, "what do you want to do?"

She took another step forward into the room. "I'll tell you," she said seriously. "I want to stay here with you boys and talk about a new book by Havelock Ellis that I've just been reading; and after dinner I want to look over that feminist article you're writing and tell you what's wrong with it, and then copy it out for you on the typewriter." I looked at Max. Max turned to the girl.

"Sit down," he said gravely, "put your feet on the desk, and have a cigarette. We will all collaborate on an article entitled 'The Modern Idea of Woman.'"

1915