Nevertheless, it is observed that the number of illegitimate children is on the decline, and free marriage may prove an abnormal, temporary condition created by the circumstances of war and by the measures of governments eager to multiply the population.

Q — Do you prefer the woman of today to the woman of yesterday?

A — Without a doubt, François Mauriac answers. The modern woman is better than the old. She is broader in culture and more energetic. Today she is her children's companion, not their servant; her husband's comrade, not his slave. She does not disown the love match, but she does not make love alone the object of her trust; she brings practical considerations into it as well.

She is less given to coquetry and pampering, less attached to gowns and jewels, firmer of soul, and further removed from excess of softness and delicacy.

In the old days some women of the upper class were forced into virtue — into the life of the convent, or the life of captivity within closed palaces — so that their virtue was artificial; while the daughters of the common people were forced into prostitution to satisfy the appetites of the sons of the privileged. Today there is no compulsion toward virtue, nor toward prostitution. Today's virtue is worth more than yesterday's, because it is freely chosen; and today's marriage is better than yesterday's, because woman accepts it by her own choice, not from the pressure of necessity.

As for the conclusion I wish to reach, it is this:

First, that woman's evolution among us moves along the track of the evolution the women of the West have traversed, but more slowly and with greater reserve; and that the circumstances which drove them, there, toward freedom and work are the very ones now driving our women along this road.

Second, that the pivot of the Western woman's liberties is her economic freedom — that is, her ability to earn her own

living — and this freedom rests on two things: first, her taking up work; second, her equality with man in inheritance. Woman's freedom among us will become an accomplished fact on the day when every woman arms herself

with a profession that gives her the sense of her independence and gives her the right of equality with man — not in inheritance alone, but in all rights, the political included.