The insistence of Memory upon the great essentials, even to the complete sacrifice of its inherent power to appease, was most poignantly brought to my attention during two months I spent in Europe in the summer of 1915. Desolated women, stripped by war of all their warm domestic interests and of children long cherished in affectionate solicitude, sat shelterless in the devastating glare of Memory. Because by its pitiless light they were forced to look into the black depths of primitive human nature, occasionally one of these heart-broken women would ignore the strident claims of the present and would insist that the war was cutting at the very taproots of the basic human relations so vitally necessary to the survival of civilization. I cannot hope to have adequately reproduced in Chapter V those conversations which themselves partook of the grim aspect of war. It was during this cataclysmic summer in Europe that I sometimes sought for a solace, or at least for a source of sanity, by resting my mind on the immemorial monuments of ancient Egypt, from which I had once received an almost mystic assurance of the essential unity of man’s age-long spiritual effort. But because such guarding of continuity as Egypt had afforded me had been associated with an unexpected revival of childish recollections, I found that Memory was a chief factor also in this situation. Therefore, in spite of the fact that these reminiscences of my childhood were vividly resuscitated in Egypt by a process which postulates a reversal of the one described in the first two chapters of this book, I venture to incorporate my personal experience in the last chapter. It may suggest one more of our obligations to Memory, that Protean Mother, who first differentiated primitive man from the brute; who makes possible our complicated modern life so daily dependent on the experiences of the past; and upon whom at the present moment is thrust the sole responsibility of guarding, for future generations, our common heritage of mutual good-will. THE LONG ROAD OF WOMAN’S MEMORY CHAPTER I WOMEN’S MEMORIES--TRANSMUTING THE PAST, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF THE DEVIL BABY Quite as it would be hard for any one of us to select the summer in which he ceased to live that life, so ardent in childhood and early youth, when all the real happenings are in the future, so it must be difficult for old people to tell at what period they began to regard the present chiefly as a prolongation of the past. There is no doubt, however, that such instinctive shiftings and reversals have taken place for many old people who, under the control of Memory, are actually living much more in the past than in the ephemeral present.