by these women.

But while that is true it is also true that the personal life of the
unmarried woman presents acute problems of a most intricate kind.
Probably only a woman can truly understand those problems or justly
estimate their urgency, but no man with any insight or sympathy can
fail to know that the lot of the unmarried woman involves secret
stresses, unsatisfied yearnings, and sometimes hours of dark
depression. She may be unmarried because she has persistently refused
to try to be satisfied with any second best. As a witty woman friend of
mine once put it, she may be unmarried because "the attainable was not
desirable and the desirable was not attainable." She may be unmarried
because a very true lover of early days went on before, and she has
never felt able to put anyone else in his place. Or she may have loved
truly some man who loved another. Or nothing may ever have happened
to awaken conscious love in her, in which case it is still possible
that her nature may cry out at times for the satisfaction of its
primary needs. And while all this is true, she is conventionally
supposed never to show by any sign that she would have liked to be
married. However much she may suffer it is held unseemly for her to
show that she suffers, or to ask for sympathy. She is often, and I
think quite indefensibly, denied by social convention the stimulus of
any really intimate friendships with men. She is made the subject of
uncounted third-rate jokes. And if, as life goes on, she develops
peculiarities of manner or asperities of temper--if she begins to lose
vitality and grace, these things are noted with contempt by people who
little imagine how much real heroism may lie concealed in the object of
their scorn. I believe, however, that I speak for a very large number
of men when I confess that nothing kindles in me quite the same
flame of resentment at things as they are, as just this fact that so