Part 41

I have always known you were only half-developed. There are many such people in the world. They serve their purpose and often do much good. They miss a great deal of life, but as they rarely know that they miss anything, it is a waste of sentiment to pity them.

I have pitied you, nevertheless. I have often wished I could give you the vital qualities you lack.

My pity turned to indignation when I heard you express yourself in such unqualified terms of condemnation regarding other women who happened to be unlike you in temperament.

You say there is a certain line which no well-born and womanly woman can pass in thought or feeling or action.

You regard the true women of earth as a higher and rarer order of creation than the best of men, and any woman who by action or word confesses herself to be quite human in her temperament, you feel is, to a certain extent, "unclean and unsexed." You believe the really good women of earth are always on a plane above and beyond the physical. When any woman falls from her pedestal you despise her.

How dare you, madam, sitting in your cold, white chastity, lay down laws of what you consider purity, morality, and cleanliness, for other human souls?

How dare you condemn those who do not reach your standard?

What do you know of life, great, palpitating, throbbing, vital life, terrible and beautiful life, terrible while passing through the valleys of temptation, beautiful upon the heights of self-control?

How dare you assume greater virtue, greater respectability, greater fineness of sentiment, than the tempest-tossed, passion-beaten souls, about you?

What do you know of real virtue, real strength?

You have been poor, you tell me, in worldly riches, and you have been lonely, yet you have never once degraded your womanhood by an "unworthy " impulse. Never known a temptation of the senses. Those things disgusted you.

You have preferred toil to taking favours from inferiors, and you have kept yourself clean in thought, word, and deed, and now you have the reward of such virtues--a good home, a husband, and children.

You are a more devoted mother than wife, as you have always dwelt upon a lofty white peak of chaste womanhood, from which any descent into the earthly realms of life and love was repugnant--so rarely "pure" and high your nature.

Yet you have been a dutiful, loyal wife, and you are a devoted mother.

You despise all carnal-minded women, and cannot understand how women fall--save that they lack good birth and breeding.

You will aid in a benefit for their reformation, but you do not want to see them or to come near them. It makes you ill.

You are to be congratulated on never having added to the evil in the world.

But permit me, madam, to tell you some truths about yourself--and the large army of "respectable women" you represent.

However "well born" you may be, you are only half-born. The complete human being has three sides to his nature--spiritual, mental, physical.

The men and women who are evenly developed on the three sides are few. This is sometimes their fault--sometimes their misfortune.

We all pity the human being who is mentally dwarfed. We are sorry for the one whose spiritual nature is undeveloped.

But why should the many women who are devoid of the physical qualities of human nature presume to lay claim to perfection and to regard the normal woman as a suspicious character?

You have a fine, active mind, a highly spiritual nature, but you are stunted in strong, physical emotion. You are incapable of it, and pride yourself upon the fact.

If that pleases you, well and good.

But how dare you criticize God's complete human beings, who feel the great vibrations of the universe, who glow and thrill with that divine creative force, who live a thousand lives and die a thousand deaths before they learn the glory of self-conquest.

How dare you shrink even from those who fall by the wayside, and call your shrinking "purity"!

Let me ask you another question:

How dare you turn away from that girl who went through the door of the Magdalene Home you helped establish, with her fatherless child in her arms?