ildred Gower is a human
being, even as you and I, not a galvanized embodiment of superhuman
virtues such as you and I are pretending to be, perhaps even to
ourselves. The explanation of her strange aberration, which will be
doubted or secretly condemned by every woman of the sheltered classes
who loves her dependence and seeks to disguise it as something sweet
and fine and "womanly"--the explanation of her almost insane act of
renunciation of all that a lady holds most dear is simple enough,
puzzling though she found it. Ignorance, which accounts for so much of
the squalid failure in human life, accounts also for much if not all
the most splendid audacious achievement. Very often--very, very
often--the impossibilities are achieved by those who in their ignorance
advance not boldly but unconcernedly where a wiser man or woman would
shrink and retreat. Fortunate indeed is he or she who in a crisis is
by chance equipped with neither too little nor too much knowledge--who
knows enough to enable him to advance, but does not know enough to
appreciate how perilous, how foolhardy, how harsh and cruel, advance
will be. Mildred was in this instance thus fortunate--unfortunate, she
was presently to think it. She knew enough about loveless marriage to
shrink from it. She did not know enough about what poverty,
moneylessness, and friendlessness mean in the actuality to a woman bred
as she had been. She imagined she knew--and sick at heart her notion
of poverty made her. But imagination was only faintest foreshadowing
of actuality. If she had known, she would have yielded to the
temptation that was almost too strong for her. And if she had
yielded--what then? Not such a repulsive lot, as our comfortable
classes look at it. Plenty to eat and drink and to wear, servants and
equipages and fine houses and fine society, the envy of her gaping
kind--a comfortable life for the body, a comfortable death for mind and
heart, slowly and softly suffocated in luxury. Partly through
knowledge that strongly affected her character, which was on the whole
aspiring and sensitive beyond the average to the true and the
beautiful, partly through ignorance that veiled the future from her
none too valorous and hardy heart, she did not yield to the temptation.
And thus, instead of dying, she began to live, for what is life but
growth in experience, in strength and knowledge and capability?

A baby enters the world screaming with pain. The first