"I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were in the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with a loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends told, and yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world in the self sacrificing passion of human service."
Thus far I have presented the silver lining of what some timid persons call the cloud of modernism in love.
To be perfectly fair and honest, I must now mention the cloud itself, altho, like all clouds, it will soon blow away or resolve itself into a few drops of water, tears, perhaps, also of a temporary nature.
The Unadapted Woman. The sudden rise of women in certain fields of activity has left quite a number of them unpleasantly unadapted.
Certain positions, well filled by women, and which pay rather high salaries, demand but a modicum of intellectual development, little culture or manners.
The women who fill them, and who generally come from the working class, financially well off, accustomed to expensive clothes and to respectful treatment on the part of their coworkers or employers, are loath to enter a married relationship or even a liaison, with men of their social set, that is, having the same culture or lack of culture, for those men are financially lower and lack certain manners which they expect to find in their environment.
A husband of the working class type could not, in case of pregnancy, give such a woman the comfort which she now craves. Motherhood would deprive her, temporarily at least, from an income which nothing could replace.
Nor could she become subservient to a husband after being very independent and having become slightly snobbish on account of the attentions she has received from men financially superior to her.
Some of those women whom I have known, and whose profession I shall not mention to avoid references of an odious character, sought mates, legitimate or illegitimate, out of their class, taking for husbands or lovers unsuccessful professional men in need of help.
The results of those matches were anything but encouraging.