Unhappily, the social customs of the time raised an insurmountable obstacle. In addition to the fears of excessive sensibility of which we have spoken, the rigid family principle ordained that the son should belong to the family and not to his mother. He was a man: therefore let him ride and hunt and be a soldier! It was better to err through brutality than through tenderness. In reality, many mothers exercised but an indirect and ineffective influence on their sons. The sons were too much separated from them and left them too soon. Were the mothers made for the children or the children for the mothers? Judging from the number of households which were only held together by the children, one might think they were made for the mothers; and yet a woman who relied too much on this support was sure to remain in cruel loneliness. CHAPTER IV THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS If the sons were destined almost inevitably to disappoint their mothers’ hopes, the daughters were to compensate for that disappointment. We must crave pardon for entering into all these details. It is impossible to set forth the story of a woman’s heart without first of all plumbing as deeply as possible the secret of those holy passions which move women as mothers and as daughters. We started from the solid ground of marriage after the old style, a mere physical and rational fact. The sensibility of women begins to blossom out on coming into contact with physical wretchedness; it creates the sick-nurse and the alms-distributor; it is then that the mother is born. Her love for her sons has nothing but separation to look forward to; but in the love of mother for daughter a woman’s heart finds another stay. Here there is no interference to be feared from a third party. The daughter belongs to the mother, and the father does not even seek any share in their intimacy: “Women’s policy hath a mystical proceeding; we must be content to leave it to them.”[79] Let the father provide the girl’s dowry, that is all that is required of him. In the formal and somewhat Philistine society which was the outcome of the Middle Ages, the several shares of the parents were very clearly defined. But these things which the father knew nothing about are of the greatest interest for us. We want to know what went on between mother and daughter, and how the women of the future were being formed, for then we shall know also whether the mother was able to fashion for herself a lasting joy in her home, and whether she was so well satisfied with the principles on which she herself had been brought up as to apply them to her daughter. Later on we shall have to treat of more momentous questions, of ideas much more highly artistic and philosophic, but we shall meet with none from which a more thorough knowledge of the inner workings of feminine souls is to be gained. In the slightest question of education all the social questions have their echoes, as we hear the roar of the ocean in a shell.