which is to the nature of man like the sense of music to the musician, of beauty to the artist, of insight to the poet.  A man may have no ear for music, and yet be a good and noble man; but who will deny that he lacks something because he has it not?  A man may have no sense of beauty, but he is not, therefore, a depraved, immoral person; yet does he not stand outside some of the great secrets of life?  So, when this still deeper instinct of creative love is not yours, do not congratulate yourselves, or pride yourselves that you have never felt it.  For it means that you stand outside the great communion of the life of the world; it means that for you some of the music of the universe is dumb, and some of the beauty of the universe dark.

Yet how long have women been taught that this divine impulse of creation is something base!  Base even in a man, belonging to his lower nature; still more deplorable in a woman, a thing to be ashamed of, a thing to crush down and suppress, a thing you would not confess to your nearest friends, or discuss with your physician.  To speak of it even to your own mother would be to be met with the averted look and word of disapproval.  If, as a consequence of this, women have inhibited their own nature, so that many women have created in their minds a kind of tone-deafness, a colour-blindness to this side of life, does that not seem to you a tragedy?  To have so great and wonderful a thing in your nature and to suppress it as though it were something shameful and weak?  Do you wonder if the term “old maid” has become synonym for everything that is narrow, and hard, and prudish and repressive?  Do you wonder that the girls of this generation, confronted with the choice between such an attitude towards life as that, and its opposite—­willingness to give oneself to anyone, to take all that one can get, because life refuses so much that one had hoped for—­do you wonder that they often choose the second alternative?  Does it seem to you so astonishing that girls, who think more than they used to, who feel that there is nothing to be ashamed of in the divine impulse of their creative womanhood, should rather take what they can get than accept that cruel, cramped attitude of sheer repression which has been all too often their only choice in the past?  Is it really fair to say to them that their moral standards are going down, that they have no sense now of morality or self-respect?  I tell you that if one has to make a choice between the suppression of one half—­and that so beautiful a half—­of human nature, and its degradation, I would not sit in judgment on those who chose either way.