And lo! the problem of clubwomen’s reading is solved!  The wandering mind is captured; the inane residuum is abolished by union with the rest to form a normal, intelligent whole.  No more idiotic questions, no more cyclopaedia-copying, no more wool-gathering programmes.  Is it too much to expect?  Alas, we are but mortal!

I trust it has been made sufficiently clear that I think meanly neither of the intellectual ability of women nor of the services of women’s clubs.  The object of these papers is to give the former an opportunity to assert itself, and the latter a chance to profit by the assertion.  The woman’s club of the future should be a place where original ideas, fed and directed by interested reading, are exchanged and discussed.  Were I writing of men’s clubs, I should point out to them the same goal.  And then, perhaps, we may look forward to a time when a selected group of men and women may come together and talk of things in which they both, as men and women, are interested.

When this happens, I trust that in the discussion we shall not heed the advice of some modern feminists and forget that we are as God made us.  Why should each man talk to a woman “as if she were another man”?  I never heard it advised that each woman should talk to each man “as if he were another woman”; but I should resent it if I did.  Why shut our eyes to the truth?  I trust that I have not been talking to the club-women “as if they were men”; I am sure I have not meant to do so.  They are not men; they have their own ways, and those ways should be developed and encouraged.  We have had the psychology of race, of the crowd and of the criminal; where is the investigator who has studied the Psychology of Woman?  When she (note the pronoun) has arrived, let us make her president of a woman’s club.

It is with diffidence that I have outlined any definite procedure, because, after all, the precise manner in which the treatment should be applied will depend, of course, on the club concerned.  To prescribe for you most effectively, your physician should be an intimate friend.  He should have known you from birth—­better still, he should have cared for your father and your grandfather before you.  Otherwise, he prescribes for an average man; and you may be very far from the average.  The drug that he administers to quiet your nerves may act on your heart and give you the smothers—­it might conceivably quiet you permanently.  Then the doctor would send to his medical journal a note on “A Curious Case of Umptiol Poisoning,” but you would still be dead, even if all his readers should agree with him.

I have no desire to bring about casualties of this kind.  Let those who know and love each particular club devote themselves to the task of applying my treatment to it in a way that will involve a minimum shock to its nerves and a minimum amount of interference with its metabolic processes.  It will take time.  Rome was not built in a day, and a revolution in clubdom is not going to be accomplished over night.