Never has the earth seen a more complicated and contradictory being than this woman, melancholy and wistful, cold and sensitive, thirsting for life and tired of life at the same time. The blood dances otherwise in her veins, sings another song in her ears, than it has in those of any other woman since time began. She sees through her husband and is a stranger to him; his desire seems brutal to her finely-shaded and contradictory moods: she is not won, even when she allows herself to be embraced. She fears the child, since she knows she cannot fulfil its simple demands. When fate attempts to tune these fragile beings to their full pitch, they break like harp-strings under a rough touch. They are only able to live partially—but thus they do not find life worth living. Even if such a woman chooses this partial life and gives herself entirely to work, she will nevertheless be still disturbed, in the domain of personal self-assertion, by the woman’s nature she has in the main suppressed; for she will often be confronted by the choice of not succeeding at all or of succeeding by the means of man, the means she abhorred in him before she herself discovered that it is the struggle for existence which gives the bird of prey its beak and claws. She is forced to lament in the choice between relentlessly seeking her own or failing; between the necessity of being hammer or anvil, of dividing herself in order to give, or collecting herself in order to create. Until woman took up a position in the world of public competition, she did not suffer from this necessity. It was thus that—in a literal as well as a spiritual sense—she could afford to develop affection, sympathy, goodness. It is therefore a melancholy truth that woman’s nature, as it has become when removed from the struggle for existence, is profoundly opposed to the condition which in the present economical and psychological circumstances brings success in this struggle, the condition, namely, of forcing one’s way over others. This conflict often begins in a field where woman cannot renounce her relation to motherhood—that is, where she herself is the daughter. Even in this character she has a choice to make, pain to inflict and to suffer. When we thus see the woman of the present day placed between insoluble conflicts on every side—or agonising, if solved—we are no longer tempted to agree with the poet’s dictum that woman’s name is weakness. For in every fibre we feel that her name is pain.