may have no sense of beauty, but he is not, therefore, a
depraved, immoral person; yet does he not stand outside some of the great
secrets of life? So, when this still deeper instinct of creative love is
not yours, do not congratulate yourselves, or pride yourselves that you
have never felt it. For it means that you stand outside the great communion
of the life of the world; it means that for you some of the music of the
universe is dumb, and some of the beauty of the universe dark.

Yet how long have women been taught that this divine impulse of creation
is something base! Base even in a man, belonging to his lower nature; still
more deplorable in a woman, a thing to be ashamed of, a thing to crush down
and suppress, a thing you would not confess to your nearest friends, or
discuss with your physician. To speak of it even to your own mother would
be to be met with the averted look and word of disapproval. If, as a
consequence of this, women have inhibited their own nature, so that
many women have created in their minds a kind of tone-deafness, a
colour-blindness to this side of life, does that not seem to you a tragedy?
To have so great and wonderful a thing in your nature and to suppress it as
though it were something shameful and weak? Do you wonder if the term
"old maid" has become synonym for everything that is narrow, and hard, and
prudish and repressive? Do you wonder that the girls of this generation,
confronted with the choice between such an attitude towards life as that,
and its opposite--willingness to give oneself to anyone, to take all that
one can get, because life refuses so much that one had hoped for--do you
wonder that they often choose the second alternative? Does it seem to you
so astonishing that girls, who think more than they used to, who feel that
there is nothing to be ashamed of in the divine impulse of their creative
womanhood, should rather take what they can get than accept that cruel,
cramped attitude of sheer repression which has been all too often their
only choice in the past? Is it really fair to say to them that their
moral standards are going down, that they have no sense now of morality
or self-respect? I tell you that if one has to make a choice between the
suppression of one half--and that so beautiful a half--of human nature, and
its degradation, I would not sit in judgment on those who chose either way.

But there is another possibility. You can repress, and God knows how many
bo