the fopperies of the time." The question, as she pertinently concludes is,
as indeed it still remains to-day: "Have we more than the average
proportion? I do not know." Nor to-day do we know.

But while to-day, as ever before, we have a certain proportion of these
emancipated girls, and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we are able
to understand that they have an element of reason on their side, it would
be a mistake to suppose that they are more than exceptions. The majority
are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social
emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers, the
anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element
of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which
impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.

We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process
is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their children, who
still remain children to them even when they are grown up. They wish to
guide them and mould them and cherish them, to protect them from the
world, to enjoy their society and their aid, and they expect that their
children shall continue indefinitely to remain children. The children, on
their side, remain and always will remain, tenderly attached to their
parents, and it would really pain them to feel that they are harbouring
any unwillingness to stay in the home even after they have grown up, so
long as their parents need their attention. It is, of course, the
daughters who are thus expected to remain in the home and who feel this
compunction about leaving it. It seems to us--although, as we have seen,
so unlike the attitude of former days--a natural, beautiful, and rightful
feeling on both sides.

Yet, in the result, all sorts of evils tend to ensue. The parents often