To digress a moment:  When it comes to the arts, that is quite another matter.  If a woman finds herself with a talent (I refrain from such a big word as genius, as only posterity should presume to apply that term to any one’s differentiation from his fellows), by all means let her work like a man, take a man’s chances, make every necessary sacrifice to develop this blessed gift; not only because it is a duty but because the rewards are adequate.  The artistic career, where the impulse is genuine, furnishes both in its rewards and in the exercise of the gift itself far more happiness, or even satisfaction, than husband, children, or home.  The chief reason is that it is the supreme form of self-expression, the ego’s apotheosis, the power to indulge in the highest order of spiritual pride, differentiation from the mass.  These are brutal truths, and another truth is that happiness is the universal goal, whatever form it may take, and whatever form human hypocrisy may compel it to take, or even to deny.  Scientific education has taught us not to sacrifice others too much in its pursuit.  That branch of ancestral memory known as conscience has morbid reactions.

To create, to feel something spinning out of your brain, which you hardly realize is there until formulated on paper, for instance; the adventurous life involved in the exercise of any art, with its uncertainties, its varieties, its disappointments, its mistakes; the fight, the exaltations, the supreme satisfactions—­all this is the very best life has to offer.  And as art is as impartial as a microbic disease, women do achieve, individually, as much as men; sometimes more.  If their bulk has not in the past been as great, the original handicaps, which women in general, aided by science and a more enlightened public, are fast shedding, alone were to blame.  Certainly as many women as men in the United States are engaged in artistic careers; more, if one judged by the proportion in the magazines.

Although I always feel that a man, owing to the greater freedom of his life and mental inheritances, has more to tell me than most women have, and I therefore prefer men as writers, still I see very little difference in the quality of their work.  Often, indeed, the magazine fiction (in America) of the women shows greater care in phrase and workmanship than that of the men (who are hurried and harried by expensive families), and often quite as much virility.

No one ever has found life a lake.  Life is a stormy ocean at best, and if any woman with a real gift prefers to sink rather than struggle, or to float back to shore on a raft, she deserves neither sympathy nor respect.  Women born with that little tract in their brain sown by Nature with bulbs of one of the arts, may conquer the world as proudly as men, although not as quickly, for they rouse in disappointed or apprehensive men the meanest form of sex jealousy; but if they have as much courage as talent, if they are willing to dedicate their lives, not their off hours, to the tending of their rich oasis in the general desert of mind, success is theirs.  Biological differences between the sexes evaporate before these impersonal sexless gifts (or whims or inadvertencies) of conservative Nature.