“Other women seem to do things by instinct,” she mused, “but I have, apparently, to do them from conviction.  It must be the masculine traits in me.  They say all women have masculine traits, that if they were purely feminine, they would be monstrous; and that all civilized men have much of the feminine in them or they would not be civilized.  I suppose there’s rather more of the masculine in me than in the majority of women.”

Now Mary Morrison, she concluded, was almost pure feminine—­she was the triumphant exposition of the feminine principle.

Some lines of Arthur Symons came to her notice—­lines which she tried in vain not to memorize.

     “‘I am the torch,’ she saith; ’and what to me
       If the moth die of me?  I am the flame
     Of Beauty, and I burn that all may see
       Beauty, and I have neither joy nor shame,
     But live with that clear light of perfect fire
     Which is to men the death of their desire.

     ’"I am Yseult and Helen, I have seen
       Troy burn, and the most loving knight lies dead. 
     The world has been my mirror, time has been
       My breath upon the glass; and men have said,
     Age after age, in rapture and despair,
     Love’s few poor words before my mirror there.

     “’I live and am immortal; in my eyes
       The sorrow of the world, and on my lips
     The joy of life, mingle to make me wise!’” ...

Was it wisdom, then, that Mary Morrison possessed—­the immemorial wisdom of women?

Oh, the shame of it!  The shame of being a woman!

Kate denied herself to McCrea when he called.  She plunged into the development of her scheme for an extension of motherhood.  State motherhood it would be.  Should the movement become national, as she hoped, perhaps it had best be called the Bureau of Children.

It was midsummer by now and there was some surcease of activity even in “welfare” circles.  Many of the social workers, having grubbed in unspeakable slums all winter, were now abroad among palaces and cathedrals, drinking their fill of beauty.  Many were in the country near at hand.  For the most part, neophytes were in charge at the settlement houses.  Kate was again urged to domesticate herself with Jane Addams’s corps of workers, but she had an aversion to being shut between walls.  She had been trapped once,—­back at the place she called home,—­and she had not liked it.  There was something free and adventurous in going from house to house, authoritatively rearranging the affairs of the disarranged.  It suited her to be “a traveling bishop.”  Moreover, it left her time for the development of her great Idea.  In a neighborhood house privacy and leisure were the two unattainable luxuries.