preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers. After that,
for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to
romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and
motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she
should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered
training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is,
like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and
her greatest service only when working in loving association with the
man of her choice.




II

Woman's Heritage


So thoroughly have modern men fastened their attention upon the problems
of the immediate present, that one feels driven to justify oneself in
taking up an historical investigation of any subject presented in a
popular manner. And yet it takes little argument to show that what we
shall be depends in large measure on what we are; and that what we are
rests back on what we have been. In anything we try to think or feel or
do, we quickly reach a limit; and this limit is determined by the
original quality of our nervous system plus the training it has
received. For here is the curious fact about this instrument of thought
and feeling which at once takes it away from comparison with mechanical
instruments. Whatever it does, becomes a part of itself, and then helps
to determine what it will do the next time and how it will do it. With