about our souls or our neighbors' souls, or the social order which we did not establish, and the painful problems that we cannot solve. Our spirits, at all times restless and troubled, respond with quick alarm to these dismal agitations; our serenity is not proof against the strain; our sense of humor is not keen enough to cure us with wholesome laughter; and nineteenth-century cultivation consists in being miserable for misery's sake, and in saying solemnly to one another at proper intervals, "This is the eternal progress of the ages."
It was a curious and rather melancholy experience, a year ago, to hear the comments of those patient women who devoted their afternoons to Ibsen readings, and to turning over in their minds the new and unprofitable situations thus suggested. The discussions that followed were invariably ethical, never critical; they had reference always to some moral conundrum offered by the play, never to the artistic or dramatic excellence of the play itself. Was Nora Helmer justified, or was she not, in abandoning her children with explicit confidence to the care of Mary Ann? Had Dr. Wangel a right, or had he not, to annul his
