ays--Strength shall not
help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but
by other means. And so the world makes men and women.

"Look at this little chin of mine, Waldo, with the dimple in it. It
is but a small part of my person; but though I had a knowledge of all
things under the sun, and the wisdom to use it, and the deep loving
heart of an angel, it would not stead me through life like this little
chin. I can win money with it, I can win love; I can win power with it,
I can win fame. What would knowledge help me? The less a woman has in
her head the lighter she is for climbing. I once heard an old man say,
that he never saw intellect help a woman so much as a pretty ankle; and
it was the truth. They begin to shape us to our cursed end," she said,
with her lips drawn in to look as though they smiled, "when we are tiny
things in shoes and socks. We sit with our little feet drawn up under us
in the window, and look out at the boys in their happy play. We want to
go. Then a loving hand is laid on us: 'Little one, you cannot go,' they
say, 'your little face will burn, and your nice white dress be spoiled.'
We feel it must be for our good, it is so lovingly said: but we cannot
understand; and we kneel still with one little cheek wistfully pressed
against the pane. Afterwards we go and thread blue beads, and make a
string for our neck; and we go and stand before the glass. We see the
complexion we were not to spoil, and the white frock, and we look into
our own great eyes. Then the curse begins to act on us. It finishes its
work when we are grown women, who no more look out wistfully at a more
healthy life; we are contented. We fit our sphere as a Chinese woman's
foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though God had made both--and yet he
knows nothing of either. In some of us the shaping of our end has been
quite completed. The parts we are not to use have been quite atrophied,
and have even dropped off; but in others, and we are not less to be
pitied, they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but our
limbs have not grown to them; we know that we are compressed, and chafe
against them.

"But what does it help? A little bitterness, a little longing when
we are young, a little futile searching for work, a little passionate
striving for room for the exercise of our powers,--and then we go with
the drove. A woman must march with her regiment. In the end she must be
trodden down or go with it; and