It strikes me rather that the reign of common-sense has begun—­that the age of utility has come.  When nine out of every ten of the girls you meet in smart society have a distinct vocation of their own; when a girl who only sings or plays or crochets is considered by her sister-women to be a butterfly; when society girls are being trained nurses; when, if you are paying calls upon a fashionable friend, you are quite apt to be told that she is living at Hull House this month; when a girl whose face generally appears in the society column suddenly comes out as the composer of a new song; when a girl who dances best at balls calmly announces that she is taking a course at the university; when everything nowadays is gone into so seriously, the time has come to look the question of the new woman squarely in the face—­to put a stop to cheap witticisms at her expense and to give her your honest respect.

The new woman has attacked the problem of how to live.  Not how to live for show, not how to veneer successfully, but how to get the most good out of life.  She is not simply endeavoring to kill time as she once was.  She is trying to live each day for itself.  She is not living so much in the to-morrows which never come.  Having begun to earn her own money, she is learning the value of her father’s—­a thing the American father has been trying to teach her for fifty or a hundred years, but she could not learn because she saw it come so easily and she let it go so freely.

A man said to me not long ago, “What has got into the girls?  Has it become the fashion to economize?  All the nicest girls I know are talking of the value of money and of how much is wasted unthinkingly.  Are we poor bachelors to take courage and believe that we can afford one of these beautiful luxuries in wives?”

Alas, it is anything but a hint to take courage; for this heavenly phase of the new woman means that when she has learned that she can support herself, so that in case her riches take wings she need not be forced to drudge at uncongenial employment, or to marry for a home, she will be more particular than ever in the kind of a man she marries.  For in fitting herself for marriage she is learning quite as well the kind of husband she ought to have.  And she will not be as apt to marry a man on account of his clothes or because he dances divinely as once she might have done.

I do not mean to say that the new woman will not marry.  In point of fact she will—­if properly urged by the right man.  But she will not marry so early, so hurriedly, nor so ill-advisedly as before.  And therefore the men whom new women marry will do well to realize the compliment of her choice; for it will mean that, according to her light, he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting.  Of course the other women marry on that principle too.  The only difference between the new woman and her sisters is in the amount of her light and the use she makes of it.