with his hundred male-milliners and dressmakers is helping finally to
explode the ancient myth, that it is woman's exclusive sphere, and a part
of her domestic toil, to cut and shape the garments she or her household
wear.

Year by year, day by day, there is a silently working but determined
tendency for the sphere of woman's domestic labours to contract itself; and
the contraction is marked exactly in proportion as that complex condition
which we term "modern civilisation" is advanced.

It manifests itself more in England and America than in Italy and Spain,
more in great cities than in country places, more among the wealthier
classes than the poorer, and is an unfailing indication of advancing modern
civilisation. (There is, indeed, often something pathetic in the attitude
of many a good old mother of the race, who having survived, here and there,
into the heart of our modern civilisation, is sorely puzzled by the change
in woman's duties and obligations. She may be found looking into the eyes
of some ancient crone, who, like herself, has survived from a previous
state of civilisation, seeking there a confirmation of a view of life of
which a troublous doubt has crept even into her own soul. "I," she cries,
"always cured my own hams, and knitted my own socks, and made up all the
linen by hand. We always did it when we were girls--but now my daughters
object!" And her old crone answers her? "Yes, we did it; it's the right
thing; but it's so expensive. It's so much cheaper to buy things ready
made!" And they shake their heads and go their ways, feeling that the
world is strangely out of joint when duty seems no more duty. Such women
are, in truth, like a good old mother duck, who, having for years led her
ducklings to the same pond, when that pond has been drained and nothing is
left but baked mud, will still persist in bringing her younglings down to
it, and walks about with flapping wings and anxious quack, trying to induce