And yet I will wager that Karin Michaëlis never read _La Crise_. Had she
read it, however, her book would still have remained all her own, by
reason of her individual treatment of a subject that is also a dangerous
one. We have made considerable advances since 1848. Even in Denmark
physiology now plays a large part in literature. Feuillet did not
venture to do more than to make his Juliet experience temptation from a
medical lover, who is a contrast to her magistrate husband. Although
doctors come off rather badly in _The Dangerous Age_, the book owes much
to them and to medical science. Much; perhaps too much. If this woman's
work had been imagined and created by a man, no doubt he would have been
accused of having lost sight of women's repugnance to speak or write of
their physical inferiority, or even to dwell upon it in thought. Yet the
name Karin Michaëlis is no pseudonym; the writer really is of the same
sex as her heroine Elsie Lindtner.

Is not this an added reason for the curiosity which this book awakens?
The most sincere and complete, the humblest and most moving of feminine
confessions proceeds from one of those Northern women, whom we Latin
races are pleased to imagine as types of immaterial candour, sovereign
"intellectuality," and glacial temperament--souls in harmony with their
natural surroundings, the rigid pine forests and snow-draped heathlands
of Scandinavia.

A Scandinavian woman! Immediately the words evoke the chaste vision sung
by Leconte de Lisle, in his poem "l'Epiphanie":

Elle passe, tranquille, en un rêve divin,
Sur le bord du plus frais de tes lacs, ô Norvège!
Le sang rose et subtil qui dore son col fin