Nothing is more instructive than to proceed from a general to a particular case; and nothing, at all events, could possibly be more instructive where women are concerned, than to select the positive English girl as the particular case; because it is in her heart that the conflict between the sound promptings of the body, and the unsound external promptings of the modern world rages most fiercely and most dramatically. It is in her heart that the issue of the conflict has its most momentous and far-reaching consequences. To a heart overflowing with human sympathy, there is something infinitely wistful and pathetic in the appearance of this apparently careless and blooming maiden. For, has not every circumstance of her education and upbringing conspired to make her believe that all those things which to-morrow will be the meaning and explanation of her existence, are the very things that yesterday were most concealed, most “tabooed,” most anxiously hushed up? The transition from indifference, here, to keen disconcerting interest, is an effort of the first magnitude—however willing and eager the body may be to assist in the change of standpoint. Her soul is very self-contemptuous, self-condemnatory, pessimistic. And the more positive she is, the more this will be so; because the greater will be her feeling of conflict with it. She feels she must be wrong, and her soul and the world right. She is on the verge of morbid self-dislike, self-rejection. But how can it be otherwise? Her body is a scandalous and exuberant old Pagan, and every minute of the day is whispering all kinds of shameless “indecencies” to her modern high-school soul. And she has been taught to value her modern high-school soul more than anything on earth. How can she help despising herself from the standpoint of a first-class high-school upbringing, when the latter constantly snorts prudishly at everything her other self—her body, dares to hint to her reluctantly attentive ear? Who is there to tell her that her high-school soul is entirely wrong in making her despise herself? But it is her pessimism that is so terrible and so virulent. All ill-adapted creatures are prone to be pessimistic, and she is horribly ill-adapted. Beneath all her tennis-playing, her hockey-playing, her bright and cheerful manner, that always utterly deceives her parents and the superficial adults about her, this pessimism clings to her like a limpet. But how could she help feeling ill-adapted and pessimistic, in the face of the terrible alternative that now confronts her—the alternative consisting of either doing violence to the healthy dictates of her body, or of rejecting all the deepest beliefs of her childhood and adolescence?