entreaty, and tears failed to effect. Mothers and and chaperons do not,
as a rule, bicycle, and play tennis and golf; they cannot always go to
club meetings, even to yawn through the sets, and so the young people
play by themselves, and there are fast growing a lack of restraint and a
healthy freedom of intercourse which are gravely deprecated by
grand-mammas, winked at by mothers, but enjoyed to the full by daughters.
But quidnuncs prophesy, however, that people will not marry as early as
of yore, for young people get to know one another too well by
unrestricted intercourse, and the halo with which each sex surrounds the
other is dispelled. Be this as it may, no Dutch girl wishes to go back to
the old days when she could go nowhere alone.

Yet, however much men like to have women as companions in games, they are
not so willing to allow them much to say in matters which the masculine
mind considers its own province; for the fact is that most Dutchmen
consider women inferiors, and when there is a question of admittance into
literary or artistic circles and clubs, women's work has to be of an
undeniably high order. There are one or two ladies' clubs, but they do not
at present flourish, there being so few public platforms on which women
can meet, and so the 'social grade' determines women's relative position
by women's votes, and there is small chance of crossing the Rubicon then.
There is no doubt, however, that women in Holland are slowly winning their
way to greater independence of life. They are filling posts in public
offices; they are going to the universities; they are studying medicine
and qualifying as doctors; and no doubt they will in time compel men to
acknowledge their claims to live an independent life rather than a
dependent one. Besides, in Holland, as in other countries, the proportion
between the sexes is unequal, and so necessity will force open doors of
usefulness hitherto closed to women.