phase, and it is a phase full of danger. In America it is
avoided by a frank, open, unsentimental companionship between boys and
girls, between young men and young women. In England, where this wisely
free comradeship is regarded as "improper", the perfectly harmless and
natural sexual feeling is either dwarfed or forced, and so we have
"prudishness" and "fastness". The sweeter and more loving natures become
prudes; the more shallow as well as the more high-spirited and merry
natures become flirts. Often, as in my own case, the merry side finds its
satisfaction in amusements that demand active physical exercise, while
the loving side finds its joy in religious expansion, in which the
idealised figure of Jesus becomes the object of passion, and the life of
the nun becomes the ideal life, as being dedicated to that one devotion.
To the girl, of course, this devotion is all that is most holy, most
noble, most pure. But analysing it now, after it has long been a thing of
the past, I cannot but regard it as a mere natural outlet for the dawning
feelings of womanhood, certain to be the more intense and earnest as the
nature is deep and loving.

One very practical and mischievous result of this religious feeling is
the idealisation of all clergymen, as being the special messengers of,
and the special means of communication with, the "Most High". The priest
is surrounded by the halo of Deity. The power that holds the keys of
heaven and of hell becomes the object of reverence and of awe. Far more
lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that patent of
nobility straight from the hand of the "King of kings", which seems to
give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal, to crown
the head of the priest with the diadem which belongs to those who are
"kings and priests unto God". Swayed by these feelings, the position of a
clergyman's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and has therefore
a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which the particular
clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is the "sacred
office", the nearness to "holy things", the consecration involved, which
seem to make the wife a nearer worshipper than those who do not partake
in the immediate "services of the altar"--it is all these that shed a
glamor over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt
to self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. I know how incomprehensible
this will seem to many o