One had but to pass a week in Florida, or on any of a
hundred huge ocean steamers, or walk through the Place Vendome,
or join a party of Cook's tourists to Jerusalem, to see that the
woman had been set free; but these swarms were ephemeral like
clouds of butterflies in season, blown away and lost, while the
reproductive sources lay hidden. At Washington, one saw other
swarms as grave gatherings of Dames or Daughters, taking
themselves seriously, or brides fluttering fresh pinions; but all
these shifting visions, unknown before 1840, touched the true
problem slightly and superficially. Behind them, in every city,
town, and farmhouse, were myriads of new types -- or type-writers
-- telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory-hands,
running into millions of millions, and, as classes, unknown to
themselves as to historians. Even the schoolmistresses were
inarticulate. All these new women had been created since 1840;
all were to show their meaning before 1940.
Whatever they were, they were not content, as the ephemera
proved; and they were hungry for illusions as ever in the fourth
century of the Church; but this was probably survival, and gave
no hint of the future. The problem remained -- to find out
whether movement of inertia, inherent in function, could take
direction except in lines of inertia.
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