hing that was
strong and wholesome on either side, but very little of sex. To
imagine this in its fullness I had to imagine all social, family,
and educational conditions vastly different from anything I had
come across. From this my thoughts ran largely on social matters.
In whatever direction my thoughts ran I always surveyed them from
the point of view of a boy. I was trying to wait patiently till I
could escape from slavery and starvation, and trying to keep the
open mind I have spoken of, though I never opened a book of
poetry, or a novel, or a history, but I slipped naturally back
into my non-girl's attitude and read it through my own eyes. All
my surface-life was a sham, and only through books, which were
few, did I ever see the world naturally. A consideration of
social matters led me to feel very sorry for women, whom I
regarded as made by a deliberate process of manufacture into the
fools I thought they were, and by the same process that I myself
was being made one. I felt more and more that men were to be
envied and women pitied. I lay stress on this for it started in
me a deliberate interest in women as women. I began to feel
protective and kindly toward women and children and to excuse
women from their responsibility for calamities such as my
school-career. I never imagined that men required, or would have
thanked me for, any sort of sympathy. But it came about in these
ways, and without the least help that I can trace, that by the
time I was 19 years of age I was keenly interested in all kinds
of questions: pity for downtrodden women, suffrage questions,
marriage laws, questions of liberty, freedom of thought, care of
the poor, views of Nature and Man and God. All these things
filled my mind to the exclusion of individual men and women. As
soon as I left school I made a headlong plunge into books where
these things were treated; I had the answers to everything to
find after a long period of enforced starvation. I had to work
for my knowledge. No books or ideas came near me but what I went
in search of. Another thing that helped me to take an expansive
view of life at this time was my intense love of Nature. All
birds and animals affected me by their beauty and grace, and I
have always kept a profound sympathy with them as well as some
subtle understanding which