She was afraid for her child; afraid for her friend; afraid for the world.  The only hope of happiness for a woman, she believed, lay in an honest lover, if such a lover could be found.  Herself an intellectual, and a freed spirit, she had no trust in any of the new professional and technical careers into which she saw women crowding.  Sex seemed to her now as always the dominating fact of life.  Votes did not matter, or degrees, or the astonishing but quite irrelevant fact, as the papers announced it, that women should now be able not only to fit but to plan a battleship.  Love, and a child’s clinging mouth, and the sweetness of a Darby and Joan old age, for these all but the perverted women had always lived, and would always live.

She saw in her Helena the strong beginnings of sex.  But she also realized the promise of intelligence, of remarkable brain development, and it seemed to her of supreme importance that sex should have the first innings in her child’s life.

“If she goes to college at once, as soon as I am gone, and her brain and her ambition are appealed to, before she has time to fall in love, she will develop on that side, prematurely—­marvellously—­and the rest will atrophy.  And then when the moment for falling in love is over—­and with her it mayn’t be a long one—­she will be a lecturer, a member of Parliament perhaps—­a Socialist agitator—­a woman preacher,—­who knows?—­there are all kinds of possibilities in Helena.  But she will have missed her chance of being a woman, and a happy one; and thirty years hence she will realize it, when it is too late, and think bitterly of us both.  Believe me, dear Philip, the moment for love won’t last long in Helena’s life.  I have seen it come and go so rapidly, in the case of some of the most charming women.  For after all, the world is now so much richer for women; and many women don’t know their own minds in time, or get lost among the new landmarks.  And of course all women can’t marry; and thank God, there are a thousand new chances of happiness for those who don’t.  But there are some—­and Helena, I am certain, will be one—­who will be miserable, and probably wicked, unless they fall in love, and are happy.  And it is a strait gate they will have to pass through.  For their own natures and the new voices in the world will tempt them to this side and that.  And before they know where they are—­the moment will have gone—­the wish—­and the power.

“So, dear Philip, lend yourself to my plan; though you may seem to yourself the wrong person, and though it imposes—­as I know it will—­a rather heavy responsibility on you.  But once or twice you have told me that I have helped you—­through difficult places.  That makes me dare to ask you this thing.  There is no one else I can ask.  And it won’t be bad for you, Philip,—­it is good for us all, to have to think intimately—­seriously—­for some other human being or beings; and owing to circumstances, not your own fault, you have missed just this in life—­except for your thoughts and care for me—­bless you always, my dear friend.