fiction, has best represented the scholar's conscience disturbed by the
spectacle of a tumultuous generation of which most of the members are
too much undisturbed.

In particular Mr. Herrick has concerned himself with the status of women
in the republic which has prided itself upon nothing more than upon its
attitude toward their sex, and he has regularly insisted upon carrying
his researches beyond that period of green girlhood which appears to be
all of a woman's life that can interest the popular fiction-mongers. He
knows, without anywhere putting it precisely into words, that the
elaborate language of compliment used by Americans toward women, though
deriving perhaps from a time when women were less numerous on the
frontier than men and were therefore specially prized and praised, has
become for the most part a hollow language. The pioneer woman earned
all the respect she got by the equal share she bore in the tasks of her
laborious world. Her successor in the comfortable society which the
frontier founded by its travail neither works nor breeds as those first
women did. But the energy thus happily released, instead of being
directed into other useful channels, has been encouraged to spend itself
upon the complex arts of the parasite.

Ascribe it to the vanity of men who choose to regard women as luxurious
chattels and the visible symptoms of success; ascribe it to a wasteful
habit practised by a nation never compelled to make the best use of its
resources; ascribe it to the craft of a sex quick to seize its advantage
after centuries of disadvantage--ascribe it to whatever one will, the
fact remains that the United States has evolved a widely admired type of
woman who lacks the glad animal spontaneity of the little girl, the
ardent abandon of the mistress, the strong loyalty of the wife, the
deep, calm, fierce instincts of the mother; and who even lacks--although