A fortnight in New York had terrorized Bedient.  He perceived that men had not humility, nor passionate appreciation for anything; that they were dazed with their own or other men’s accumulations; that they destroyed every dream of woman, drove the kingdom of heaven from her heart, with their comings and their goings and their commonness.  He came to believe that this was an age of impossible men, impossible lovers, artists, and critics, because they had not the delicacy and wisdom to accept the finer forces, which women bring into the world for men.

Indeed, he saw that this was woman’s gray hour of restless hoping, pitiful dreaming and untellable pain; that out of these must come the new generation.  Then it appeared to him with splendid cheer, that woman had not fallen to these modern miseries, but risen to them, from a millenium of serfdom, untimely outraging, hideous momentary loving, brute mastery, ownership and drudgery....  These of to-day were finer sufferings; this an age of transition in which she was passing through valleys of terrible shadow, but having preserved her natural greatness through the milleniums, she could not fail now with her poor gleanings of real love to give the world a generation of finer-grained men.

Women, then, he thought, have a natural greatness which man cannot destroy.  If men were able to destroy it, the sources of the saving principle of the race would be shut off.  But marvellously can man inspire this natural greatness, make it immense and world-swaying by bringing out the best of women, and yet how few have this chivalry!  Here was the anguish, the failure.  With his mind filled with these illimitable possibilities, Bedient was overcome with his insight of New York, the awfulness of ignorance and cruelty in the ordinary relations of man with woman.

Bedient firmly believed that if women were granted (a heavenly dispensation, it would have to be) a decade of happiness beginning now, a decade of lovers of their own choosing, men of delicacy and wisdom, that thirty years from now there would be that poise and sweetness in the world that dreamers descry in far future ages.  And here and there would be a beyond-man, indeed; and here and there cosmic, instead of mere self-consciousness.

He believed that the greatest miracle for the unsealed eye in this day, was that woman had emerged from a degraded past with this powerful present vitality; the capacity to hope and dream and suffer and be aroused; that she had the fervor and power of visioning left to be aroused!  Surely this was the Third of the Trinity sustaining her....  Bedient began to study with sympathy and regard those groups of women, willing to sacrifice the best of their natures and descend into man’s spheres of action, there to wring from man on his own ground the privileges so doggedly withheld.  He saw that their sacrifice was heroic; that their cause was “in the air”; that this was but one startling manifestation of a great feminist seething over the world; and yet every brightness of evolution depended, as he saw it, upon woman being herself, retaining first of all those stores of beauty and spirit which are designed to be her gifts to manhood and the race.  In the eyes of the future, he believed, these women would stand as the inspired pioneers of a rending transition period.