notion of honor for women as men plan it out — despite the obscurity of the operation!

Then there is the eternal secret pattern: "the woman-harlot!"

Scores of women live this pat-tern because men want them to live it.

Thus do circumstances and fates play with woman's des-tinies — not because she is a creature without a mind. No: she possesses it as man does; the only difference is that she asks for a pattern to follow. This is woman's cry — unless she has already chosen the pattern in her childhood and goes about declaring that she will be nothing but herself, and so no man's theory has any influence over her.

The real tragedy does not lie in women's asking for a pattern for their femininity, nor yet in men's giving them these gen-erous patterns of the sort of child-wives, girls with boyish faces, skilled secretaries, noble pious women, sacrificing moth-ers, wives who bear children with virgin coldness, harlots who accept degradation as a favor to men... and other such ready-made patterns that deprive woman of being a com-plete human being. And man is prepared to accept woman as a lie — whether she be an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, a bosom, a womb, a servant, an encyclopedic authority — any-thing except a human being, a real, feminine human being.

It is natural, too, that women love to live the strange, mag-ical patterns. And the best of them, of course, is the one as far removed from the familiar and the ordinary as can be.

Yes, these are not the roots of the tragedy. The absurdity in Beatrice, Dante's pattern, has its source in her inhumanity, for it was imposed upon her to remain a pure virgin while he enjoyed a home and children. And yet this is not the worst of the matter; for the woman,

if after long struggle she succeeds in adapting herself to the pattern, the man will hate her for it.

With marriage the patterns are shattered. If a certain man marries a certain pattern, he will begin to weary of the pattern and go madly searching for other patterns — noble Agnes, pure Beatrice, the child-wife, and so forth. Whatever the pattern, and however well the woman succeeds in putting it on, the man will demand another. And this is the tragedy of modern marriage.

The modern woman is no fool, but the modern man is a fool — that is the simplest statement of the problem. He becomes entangled in his own designs simply because he does not know how he wants her to be. We see how quickly the patterns change and succeed one another, and that is nothing but a reaction to men's hysteria in designing patterns. Women are not fools, but they must have patterns; they perceive the folly of men, and they do not respect the pattern either — yet they accept it, for otherwise they would lose their field of existence.

Yes, women are not fools; they too have their logic, though it differs from the logic of men. Theirs is the logic of emotion; men's is the logic of reason, and the two logics are opposed. Yet women's emotional logic is no less real and frank than men's rational logic; it merely works in a different direction.

Woman, in truth, never loses her emotional logic. She may spend her life living according to a certain pattern, and then, in the end, the terrible logic of emotion rises up in her and sets about smashing the pat-tern, if it has lacked emotional fulfillment. This is the partial explanation of the astonish-ing changes that come over women: they may long live a

pure Beatrice, or a child-wife,

and suddenly the pure, meek Beatrice becomes a snarling lioness. The pattern has failed emotionally!!