In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such--Stella Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff--have been veritable epics upon woman's nature; have revealed the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their scrappy past, if not order and coherence, a justification, and then alone will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper than those which are conscious or even personal. This is the age when, if ever, no girl should be compelled. It is the experiences of this age, never entirely obliterated in women, that enable them to take adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these experiences are more limited in range though no less intense. It is this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to man and even unrealized to herself. It is the echoes from it that make vast numbers of mothers pursue the various branches of culture, often half secretly, to maintain their position with their college sons and daughters, with their husbands, or with society.
But in a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with American girls, along with rapidly in creasing development of capacity there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless marriage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost; and thus the clear air of morning begins to haze over and unconsciously she begins to grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded into more or less sourness; has developed more petty self-indulgences; has come to feel a right to happiness almost as passionately as the men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late movement for enfranchisement felt for liberty. Very likely she has turned to other women and entered into innocent Platonic pairing-off relations with some one. There is a little more affectation, playing a rôle, and interest in dress and appearance is either less or more specialized and definite. Perhaps she has already begun to be a seeker who will perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her temper is modified; there is a slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to them; an analysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and insight becomes too clear; sense of responsibility without an object; a slight general _malaise_ and a sense that society is a false "margarine" affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child the real value of a woman is revealed. There are alternations between excessive self-respect which demands something almost like adoration of the other sex and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes generally.