' We feel it must be for our good, it
is so lovingly said: but we cannot understand; and we kneel still with one
little cheek wistfully pressed against the pane. Afterwards we go and
thread blue beads, and make a string for our neck; and we go and stand
before the glass. We see the complexion we were not to spoil, and the
white frock, and we look into our own great eyes. Then the curse begins to
act on us. It finishes its work when we are grown women, who no more look
out wistfully at a more healthy life; we are contented. We fit our sphere
as a Chinese woman's foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though God had made
both--and yet he knows nothing of either. In some of us the shaping of our
end has been quite completed. The parts we are not to use have been quite
atrophied, and have even dropped off; but in others, and we are not less to
be pitied, they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but our
limbs have not grown to them; we know that we are compressed, and chafe
against them.
"But what does it help? A little bitterness, a little longing when we are
young, a little futile searching for work, a little passionate striving for
room for the exercise of our powers,--and then we go with the drove. A
woman must march with her regiment. In the end she must be trodden down or
go with it; and if she is wise she goes.
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