There is Nora, for instance, who has become the platform woman. I do not think that anyone has ever explained in what Nora’s sacrifice for her husband consisted. It rests upon Heyse’s fundamental principle--the incommensurable, _i.e._, that which cannot be measured by the common standard. In the essay upon Heyse I have enlarged upon this. In Nora’s eyes love is the great miracle, the gift that one receives without having done anything to deserve it. In her eyes there is nothing above or below that can be compared to love. That is how she loves her Helmer. Social duties and other considerations, unless they are in some way connected with him, have no existence for her. Her husband takes the place of the entire network of engagements and obligations with which most people, especially women, occupy the greater part of their lives. Everything that is exists for her only in its relation to him; if it bears no relation to him, it has no existence for her either. Her love is her religion, her law book, her moral code, and the sole object of her being. And her great disappointment is this: that for Helmer love is not the incommensurable, it is not the thing which is of chief importance in his life. She had given herself to him entirely, but he had not given himself in like manner, and the discovery freezes her heart and her senses. The much-talked of “miracle” in which she can no longer believe is nothing other than the awakening of the incommensurable in Helmer’s soul. Here we have the fundamental instinct of human nature which both Heyse and Ibsen, independently of one another, discover to be the absolute and all-ruling motive in the lives of hundreds of the women of their time. Heyse was the first to immortalise this variety, and in his _Children of the World_ he calls her Toinette; Ibsen calls her Hedda Gabler. She is the sexless woman who is filled with spiritual emotions, and who, though utterly passionless, is a mistress of the art of attracting and fascinating the man, though the mere thought of abandoning herself to him fills her with a feeling of unconquerable horror. It is a type which has considerably increased in numbers and lost in charm during the last ten years; the woman who is really emancipated and entirely freed from man, the unmarried professional woman who is perfectly contented with her lot and who preaches happiness in independence--Björnson’s apostles of purity with Svava at their head, or Hauptmann with his Anna Mahr and the brother and sister theory (_Lonely People_), which same doctrine is now being ardently preached by the aged Tolstoy. Björnson’s Svava is also forestalled by Heyse in the person of a young girl of noble family (_In Paradise_) who sends away her strong, handsome young lover as soon as she discovers that he has lived with another woman.