3. Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes
beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters
a life of service, denial, and perhaps mortification, like the
Countess Schimmelmann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if
need be, a martyr, but all with modesty, humility, and with a
shrinking from publicity.
In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment
of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the
above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the
world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their
susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its
highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their
whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with
the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such--Stella
Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff--have
been veritable epics upon woman's nature; have revealed the
characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything
is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least
unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their
scrappy past, if not order and coherence, a justification, and then
alone will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper than
those which are conscious or even personal.
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