That clever bon-mot, “To say ‘everybody is talking about him’ is a eulogy.  To say ‘every one is talking about her’ is an elegy,” is no longer true, more’s the pity.  More’s the pity, I mean, because such a delicious bit deserves a longer life.  I could weep over the early death of an epigram with a hearty spirit, which is second only to the grief I feel at a good story spoiled for relation’s sake.  Cleverness, like beauty, is its own excuse for being, and the first attribute of the new woman is her cleverness.  It is the new woman who is responsible for the death of that epigram.  But as she did not take an active part in the murder, but was only an accessory after the fact, let us hope that she will escape with as light a sentence as possible from that stern old judge, public opinion, who is not her friend.

The newspapers have ridiculed the new woman to such an extent, and their ridicule is so popular, that it requires an act of physical courage to stand up in her defence and to tell the public that the bloomer girl is not new; that they have had the newspaper creation—­like the poor—­with them always; that they have passed over the real new woman without a second glance.  In other words, to assure them as delicately as possible that they have been barking up the wrong tree.

The first thing which endears the new woman to me personally, more even than her cleverness, is that she has a sense of humor.  You may deny that, if you want to.  I firmly believe it, but I am not infallible.  Thank Heaven that I am not.  I abominate those people who are always right.  You can’t amuse yourself by picking flaws in them.  They are so irritatingly conclusive.  Now I am never conclusive, and you ought to be glad of it.  It makes it so much pleasanter for you to be able to disagree with me logically.

Why have men always possessed an exclusive right to the sense of humor?  I believe it is because they live out-of-doors more.  Humor is an out-of-door virtue.  It requires ozone and the light of the sun.  And when the new woman came out-of-doors to live, and mingled with men and newer women, she saw funny things, and her sense of humor began to grow and thrive.  The fun of the situation is entirely lost if you stay at home too much.

Now don’t let the supersensitive men—­who always want women to pursue the perfectly lady-like employment of knitting gray socks—­don’t let them have a fit right here for fear women have come out-of-doors to stay and are never going in-doors again.  Even women, my dear sirs, know enough to go in when it rains.  They love a hearth-rug quite as well as a cat does.  A cat and a woman always come home to the hearth-rug.  But there is very little mental exhilaration in a hearth-rug.  Lots of comfort, but little humor.  The real excitement of life, at least to a cat, is when in a morning stroll abroad she goes out of her sphere—­the hearth-rug—­and meets some feline friend to whom she extends a claw,