The Last Years in Stockholm 147 who glanced at it then officiously spread the gossip.' Of like character, or still more unreasonable, are all other stories about Ellen Key, or about persons with whose erotic life she is supposed to have interfered. Ellen Key's naivete is so great that a child may fool her with some simple ruse time and again in succession, and this credulity, this lack of suspicion, light-hearted good humour, in other words, this simplicity which so endears her to her friends—though at the same time causing them much apprehension for her—^is incomprehensible to her enemies. They have not even blushed to direct indecent questions to her in public about her private life, an impudence which they have excused by saying that there could be nothing insulting in the presumption that "Miss Key lived as she preached." People forget that a woman of Ellen Key's age has good reason to believe herself able to speak on these subjects as one personally outside of them, and also that a woman with Ellen Key's public courage ought to be able to believe herself protected from the ' The gossip related in Svarla Fanor (Black Banners), by August Strindberg, is one example among the many of the slanderous tales which have appeared in print about Ellen Key.