what it pleases them to be, and to cultivate their powers in the expectation of pleasing men, if they indulge any such expectation, by their higher qualities only?  This is not a fanciful possibility.  It is one that young men will do well to ponder.  It is easy to ridicule the literary and economic and historical societies, and the naive courage with which young women in them attack the gravest problems, and to say that they are only a passing fashion, like decorative art and a mode of dress.  But a fashion is not to be underestimated; and when a fashion continues and spreads like this one, it is significant of a great change going on in society.  And it is to be noticed that this fashion is accompanied by other phenomena as interesting.  There is scarcely an occupation, once confined almost exclusively to men, in which women are not now conspicuous.  Never before were there so many women who are superior musicians, performers themselves and organizers of musical societies; never before so many women who can draw well; never so many who are successful in literature, who write stories, translate, compile, and are acceptable workers in magazines and in publishing houses; and never before were so many women reading good books, and thinking about them, and talking about them, and trying to apply the lessons in them to the problems of their own lives, which are seen not to end with marriage.  A great deal of this activity, crude much of it, is on the intellectual side, and must tell strongly by-and-by in the position of women.  And the young men will take notice that it is the intellectual force that must dominate in life.

INTERESTING GIRLS

It seems hardly worth while to say that this would be a more interesting country if there were more interesting people in it.  But the remark is worth consideration in a land where things are so much estimated by what they cost.  It is a very expensive country, especially so in the matter of education, and one cannot but reflect whether the result is in proportion to the outlay.  It costs a great many thousands of dollars and over four years of time to produce a really good base-ball player, and the time and money invested in the production of a society young woman are not less.  No complaint is made of the cost of these schools of the higher education; the point is whether they produce interesting people.  Of course all women are interesting.  It has got pretty well noised about the world that American women are, on the whole, more interesting than any others.  This statement is not made boastfully, but simply as a market quotation, as one might say.  They are sought for; they rule high.  They have a “way”; they know how to be fascinating, to be agreeable; they unite freedom of manner with modesty of behavior; they are apt to have beauty, and if they have not, they know how to make others think they have.  Probably the Greek girls in their highest development under Phidias were never so attractive as the American girls of this period; and if we had a Phidias who could put their charms in marble, all the antique galleries would close up and go out of business.