Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window.
Angel or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between
its guises.
Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in
stores and in their apartments and in their boarding houses,
women celibates five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into
the period when nature has by irrepealable edict ordained love.
It was surely unnatural, for the mass of them. They were not
vowed nuns. They were not devoted to any Great Cause. They were
just ordinary, normal young women, thousands and thousands and
thousands and thousands of them.
Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women
in the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated
quarters--women who, however they may be sentimentalized about
and however irresponsible they may be for their own condition,
are, as a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet
on them was squandered the emotional life of millions of young
men.
On the one side--intelligent, capable, effective young women,
leading lives of emotional sterility. On the other side--inferior
women blasted and withered by their specialization in the
emotional life of youth!
The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity
of living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face
facts and who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of
letting facts lie, we face them and fight them we can make a
better race.
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