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It was, of course, typical of the average well-to-do girl of the period to assume that the desire for power, which is as universal among women as among men, could only be fulfilled by the acquisition of a brilliant husband.
There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think - which is fundamentally a moral problem - must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted C3 children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of
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most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.
I believed even then that personal freedom and dignity in marriage were incompatible with economic dependence;
What exhausts women in wartime is not the strenuous and unfamiliar tasks that fall upon them, nor even the hourly dread of death for husbands or lovers or brothers or sons; it is the incessant conflict between personal and national claims which wears out their energy and breaks their spirit.
idealists, being eager and sensitive, are often more liable to nervous strain than the less altruistic who take care of themselves before they think of others.
‘I had rather have a fool to make me merry, than experience to make me sad; and to travel for it, too!’
As usual in matrimonial legislation, adultery was over-emphasised as a wrecking factor in marriage, and conditions far more disastrous to marital relations - such as habitual drunkenness, insanity and excessive incompatibility - remained inadmissible as causes for their dissolution.
Dimly I perceived that it was these very handicaps and my struggle against them which had lifted life out of mediocrity, given it glamour, made it worth while; that the individuals from whom destiny demands too much are infinitely more vital than those of whom it asks too little.
