thus suddenly driven into my consciousness, had become to me the
Weltschmerz, there was mingled a sense of futility, of misdirected energy, the belief that the pursuit of cultivation would not in the end
bring either solace or relief. I gradually reached a conviction that the
first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly,
had departed too suddenly from the active, emotional life led by their
grandmothers and great-grandmothers; that the contemporary education of young women had developed too exclusively the power of
acquiring knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in the process of "being educated" they had lost that simple and
almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful
reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of suffering or of
helplessness; that they are so sheltered and pampered they have no
chance even to make "the great refusal."
In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five years ago
were crowded with American mothers and their daughters who had
crossed the seas in search of culture, one often found the mother making real connection with the life about her, using her inadequate German with great fluency, gayly measuring the enormous sheets or
exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau, visiting impartially the
nearest kindergarten and market, making an atmosphere of her own,
hearty and genuine as far as it went, in the house and on the street.
On the other hand, her daughter was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and only at ease when in the familiar receptive
attitude afforded by the art gallery and the opera house. In the latter
she was swayed and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of
the music, intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding
use for her trained and developed powers as she sat "being cultivated"
in the familiar atmosphere of the classroom which had, as it were, become sublimated and romanticized.
I remember a happy busy mother who, complacent with the knowledge that her daughter daily devoted four hours to her music, looked
up from her knitting to say, "If I had had your opportunities when I was young, my dear, I should have been a very happy girl. I always had
musical talent, but such training as I had, foolish little songs and
waltzes and not time for half an hour's practice a day."
The mother did not dream of the sting her words left and that the
sensitive girl appreciated only too well that her opportunities were fine