frightened, and dismayed. She had known them only as they dreamed of
the past--when they talked in low tones of the days that were gone:
now she saw them as they thought only of the present and the days that
were to come. So this woman, from the world into which she had gone,
gained knowledge of mankind.

And this is the pity and the danger of it: that the woman gained this
knowledge from a world, that, even as it taught her, denied her
womanhood. The sadness of it all is this: to the world that refused to
recognize her womanhood, it was given to teach her that which would
make her womanhood complete. The knowledge that she must have to
complete her womanhood the woman should have gained only from the life
of her dreams--the life that is beyond that old, old, open door
through which she could not pass alone. In the companionship,
sympathy, strength, protection, and love, of that one who was to cross
with her the threshold of the door that God set open in the beginning,
she should have gained the knowledge of life that would ripen her
girlhood into womanhood. For what else, indeed, has God given love to
men and women? In the strength that would come to her with her
children, the woman should have been privileged to learn sorrow and
pain. In the world that would have honored, above all else, her
womanhood, she should have been permitted to find the knowledge of
life that would perfect and complete her womanhood.

Fruit, I know, may be picked green from the tree and artificially
forced to a kind of ripeness. But the fruit that matures under
Nature's careful hand; that knows in its ripening the warm sunshine
and the cleansing showers, the cool of the quiet evening and the
freshness of the dewy morn, the strength of the roaring storms and the
softness of the caressing breeze--this fruit alone, I say, has the