Even the cultivated modern man, who brings to the human personality of his wife admiration and sympathy, seeks in her always that “womanliness” to which Goethe has given the classic expression: the finely reserved, quiet, strong, self-contained woman, reposing harmoniously in the fulness of her own nature, a maternally lovely being, wholly “natural,” a “beautiful soul,” observing, creative, but using these gifts only to create a home. These creative offices the modern man who loves desires to assure, when he wishes to “maintain” his wife, and begs her to abandon the outside commercial work in which he foresees a danger to the beautiful life together of which both dream. The woman who along with her new self-conscious individuality and her profound culture has guarded the “old” devotion, understands ordinarily this desire of the man. She chooses, in spite of her idealism, as he wishes, in cases where her work has not been very personal. If she has worked in the same field as the man, then she converts her gifts into comprehension of him, into personal interest for all his interests; and these marriages in which the wife has enjoyed the same education as the man, but later has devoted herself entirely to the home, are, as a rule, the happiest marriages of the present time. But in the proportion in which her work was creative, is the difficulty of the choice. In the case where the productive power has the strength of genius, the modern man will scarcely utter such a wish and in those circumstances the modern woman will not grant it. And because the woman of genius is generally a complete human being, with strong erotic as well as universal human demands, she chooses often compromise. She finds in love, in motherhood, new revelations; and in the mysterious depths of her nature, the productive element of the maternal function has an elevating influence upon her gift of creative power. Thus the energy temporarily diminished by motherhood is restored. And her uneasy conscience, because she must entrust to others much of the care and education of the children, is appeased by the consciousness that she has often given to mankind richer natures, and so more significant children, than more devoted mothers, and that her own nature, because of the double creative activity, has attained a ripeness and richness which make her personality more significant for husband and children than if she had given up her calling to please them. These thoughts cannot, however, prevent the daily conflict between her feelings of love and the impossibility, in times of strong spiritual production, of giving expression to it. The very proximity of the children consumes at such times too much nervous energy. And since all creation requires selfishness—in the sense of concentration upon one’s _own needs_ in order to be able to work creatively and to sink oneself in the work—while all love’s solicitude requires active _attention_ to the _needs of the loved ones_, the