societies which are more serious than war. They are always reading
papers or attending lectures, and at these lectures they get a strange
assortment of "cultural" information and misinformation, delivered with
ghastly assurance by heterogeneous gentlemen in cutaway coats, who go
about and spout for pay. If you meet these ladies, and they suspect you
of being infested by the germs of "culture," they will open fire on you
with a "thought," about which you may detect a curious ghostly
fragrance, as of Alfred Noyes's lecture, last week, or of "the New
Republic" or the "Literary Digest." The most "liberal" of them may even
take "The Masses," precisely as people rather like them used to take
"The Philistine," a generation or two ago. Among the members of this
group are the women who work violently for suffrage--something in which
I personally believe, but which, merely because I believe in it, I do
not necessarily like to take in my coffee as a substitute for sugar, on
my bread as a substitute for butter, and in my ear as a substitute for
pleasant general conversation.

I do not wish to seem to speak disparagingly of women of this type, for
they are doing good, and they will do more good when they have become
more accustomed to possessing minds. Having but recently discovered
their minds, they are playing with them enthusiastically, like children
who have just discovered their new toys on Christmas morning. It is
delightful to watch them. It is diverting to have them pop ideas at you
with that bright-eyed, efficient, assertive look which seems to say:
"See! I am a liberal woman--a woman of the new type. I meet men on their
own ground. Do you wish to talk of birth control, social hygiene, and
sex attraction? Or shall we reverse the order? Or shall I show you how
much I know about Brieux, and household economics, and Ellen Key, and
eugenics, and George Meredith, and post-impressionism, and "Roberts'
Rules of Order," and theosophy, and conditions in the Sixteenth Ward?"