THE ETERNAL FEMININE

Mother Advocate has proved once more her essential femininity. She has changed her dress again. She has apparently changed her mind about just what sort of a girl she wants to be this season. No longer the demure young lady (with her moments of audacity to be sure), she will cut and curl her hair, wear a tailored suit, and thumb the pages of The World Tomorrow. And she has betrayed her womanhood most completely by a delightful bit of guile--by dating it November instead of September she has brought out her first issue on time.

It is disappointing that, with all the frailties of woman, Mother Advocate should in her newest incarnation have so little feminine grace. Her face (the editorial is on the New Outlook) is plain and pockmarked and lacks even the interest of ugliness. Her body (the first article is on The Republican Case, the second is A Preface to Socialism) is unshapely. Her hands at least are lovely (there is some good poetry in the issue). But as a whole Mother Advocate today resembles some mythical monster whose limbs lack all harmony.

Perhaps Mother Advocate has bent too long over the great alembic in which a new President is being distilled. Drunk with the fumes of politics, she has taken strange men into her house, who are not of her country (two contributors are not undergraduates). They have enslaved her own children, and torn her from the shrine of Polyhymnia, and made her bow down and worship before the heathen image of the Happy Warrior.

Fingers have beckoned to Mother Advocate before to call her from poetry to the controversies of politics or the detail of university administration. She has never before thrown herself so rashly into the arms of her seducer. There would be cause for grief were it not for the knowledge that Mother Advocate can regain her independence by a nod, and that, being herself, she will want a change again soon.