large beatitudes towards which the struggles and suffering of the women of
today may tend; who sees beyond the present, though in a future which she
knows she will never enter, an enlarged and strengthened womanhood bearing
forward with it a strengthened and expanded race, it is not so hard to
renounce and labour with unshaken purpose: but for those who have not that
view, and struggle on, animated at most by a vague consciousness that
somewhere ahead lies a large end, towards which their efforts tend; who
labour year after year at some poor little gargoyle of a Franchise Bill, or
the shaping of some rough little foundation-stone of reform in education,
or dress a stone (which perhaps never quite fits the spot it was intended
for, and has to be thrown aside!); or who carve away all their lives to
produce a corbel of some reform in sexual relations, in the end to find it
break under the chisel; who, out of many failures attain, perhaps, to no
success, or but to one, and that so small and set so much in the shade that
no eye will ever see it; for such as these, it is perhaps not so easy to
labour without growing weary. Nevertheless, it is through the labours of
these myriad toilers, each working in her own minute sphere, with her own
small outlook, and out of endless failures and miscarriages, that at last
the enwidened and beautified relations of woman to life must rise, if they
are ever to come.

When a starfish lies on the ground at the bottom of a sloping rock it has
to climb, it seems to the onlooker as though there were nothing which could
stir the inert mass and no means for taking it to the top. Yet watch it.
Beneath its lower side, hidden from sight, are a million fine tentacles;
impulses of will from the central nerve radiate throughout the whole body,
and each tiny fibre, fine as a hair, slowly extends itself, and seizes on
the minute particle of rough rock nearest to it; now a small tentacle slips
its hold, and then it holds firmly, and then slowly and slowly the whole
inert mass rises to the top.