ch for centuries
has fallen upon the nature of woman. I hold it as one of the miracles
that great women still move among us; and that to-day in every movement
and voice of women at large in the world, one perceives that the
transition is on....

The great love story can only be founded upon liberty. Bring the plan of
serfdom to a woman's nature, and one of two things takes place within
her--submission utterly or outwardly. The sons of the submissive are
neither conquerors of self nor takers of cities. The outwardly
submissive woman may inwardly contain and foster a great dream--indeed,
the fruits of these dreams have come to be--but more often the heart is
filled with secret hatreds. Sons of hatred may be sons of strength, but
the fire they burn with is red and not white.

Once I expressed the conviction that if the right man talked to a
roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of
motherhood--and his words were wise and pure enough--that not one of the
women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would
have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many
young women of the arriving generation are tremendously eager to listen,
and to answer the dream....

I looked in humility and great tenderness upon those pure feminine
elements in the Chapel, awaiting as usual what I should ask or say. When
I thought that some time they would be mothers, it came with a rush of
emotion--that I had neither words nor art, nor strength nor purity to
make them see the almost divine possibilities of their future. For years
I had written in the hope of lifting the ideals of such as these;
dreamed of writing at last with such clarity and truth that they could
not be the same after reading; but it is different writing to the great
outer Abstraction, than talking face to face in one's Study. Some of the
things said that day are written here without quotations:

... It is all soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the
outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the
orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and
women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity--the
handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl
to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment
upon the many--the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have
not thus come to be. Great women, carrying