self-expression from a woman, which was not associated with sex, was
an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither
away in the hot-house air that surrounded her. A man would have struck
for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but
her nature was rooted deep in the rich and heavy soil from which she
had tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her
mother's death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she
had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot
in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer
needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of
youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual
resistance--words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times
she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment
against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon
as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the
chest, which her mirror revealed to her. The period was full of woman's
advancement--a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her--yet she had
taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved. She had read
countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but
beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman
who grasped successfully the right to live, was as her elder sister
who had petitioned merely for the privilege to love. The modern heroine
could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the
new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who
desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been--a
tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism conspired to
ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as passionately as
she--but one and all they had revolted in graceful attitudes and
with abundant braids of hair. A false front not only extinguished
sentiment--it put an end to rebellion.