This kind of single woman fulfills more or less the office of family provider just as she also is always ready with word and deed in circles of friends and comrades. These women are so engrossed that the time of love, sometimes love itself, passes them by without their observing it. Their youth flees and they feel with sadness that their woman’s life is unlived. But they persuade themselves that they have had enough in their work, that many little joys can take the place of great happiness. And they believe this as truly as the infant believes he is satisfied when he sucks his own thumb. But some of these women acknowledge perhaps, when they have passed the fifties, that they were often tempted to call out to the first best man, “Give me a child.” Sometimes it happens that in their last youth they appease their mother longing by adopting a foster child; sometimes they still this longing by a child of their own, from a love relation or a marriage. This late and uncertain happiness is often made possible exactly through their work. And then, if not earlier, they bless this work which gives them the economic possibility, and thereby also the courage, for this hazardous adventure.
More frequent than these are the cases however where single women, who have passed their first youth, find in friendship for another woman a valve for their, in great part, unused feelings. In some natures this friendship will be jealous and exacting, in others true and devoted. I wish to emphasise that I speak here of entirely _natural spiritual conditions_. There is to-day much talk about “Sapphic” women; and it is even possible that they exist in that impure form which men imagine. I have never met them, presumably because we rarely meet in life those with whom no fibre of our being has any affinity. But I have often observed that the spiritually refined women of our time, just as formerly the spiritually refined men of Hellas, find most easily in their own sex the qualities which set their spiritual life in the finest vibration of admiration, inspiration, sympathy and adoration.
The fundamental types of single women depicted here—the person of intellect and the person of feeling—are found everywhere. The former according to current opinion already predominate in America; in Europe, it seems to me, the latter still prevail. That the main classes include innumerable varieties, it is needless to say. There are for example the numerous, quite ordinary, family girls who would be happy if they could give up their independence in order to enjoy the protection of their parents’ or their own home. And the same obtains also with the quite as ancient type of woman, Undine, who—soulless and cold—enslaves all men. If she is in any civic vocation, she knows how to get the smallest amount of work for herself and, in case she is engaged in the artistic field, the best possible criticism. Conscience is an acquaintance which she has never made and she is also of the opinion that everything agreeable is permitted to her; she simply slides past anything disagreeable. Although work belongs to these disagreeable things, she continues it until she has found means to place her “qualities” in the most advantageous manner upon the matrimonial market.