When women renounce their ambition of beauty, grace, and womanly charm in order to distinguish themselves in other directions, it often ends in their disguising themselves in men's clothes and disappearing from the scene.
The desire to ape the man often emerges even in the pious legendary world of early Christianity, and more than one female saint of those days was impelled by the desire to free herself from the common round of home and society.
The refined Roman maiden Eugenia offers an example of this kind, with, it must be owned, the not unusual result, that, reduced to the greatest extremity by her masculine predilections, she was forced after all to summon up the resources of her proper sex in order to save herself.
She was the daughter of a Roman gentleman who resided with his family at Alexandria, a city which swarmed with philosophers and learned men of every description. Accordingly, Eugenia was very carefully educated and instructed, and this was so much to her taste that, as soon as ever she began to grow up, she frequented all schools of philosophers, grammarians and rhetoricians as a student. In those visits she was always attended by a body-guard of two good-looking lads of her own age. They were the sons of two of her father's freedmen, who had been brought up in her company and made to share in all her studies.
Meanwhile she became the fairest maiden that could be found, and her youthful companions, who, strangely enough, were both named Hyacinth, grew likewise to two graceful flowers of youth. Wherever the lovely rose Eugenia appeared, the two Hyacinths were always to be seen rustling along on her right hand and her left, or following gracefully in her train while their mistress maintained a discussion with them as they followed.
Never were there two better bred companions of a blue-stocking; for they were never of a different opinion from Eugenia, and they always kept a shade behind her in learning, so that she was in the right in every instance, and was never uneasy lest she should say something less clever than her companions.
All the bookworms of Alexandria composed elegies and epigrams on this apparition of the Muses, and the good Hyacinths had to inscribe these verses carefully in golden tablets, and carry them after her.
Every season she became more beautiful and more accomplished, and she had even begun to stray in the mysterious labyrinths of Neoplatonic doctrines, when the young proconsul Aquilinus became enamoured of Eugenia and demanded her of her father to wife. But the latter entertained such a respect for his daughter that, despite his authority as a Roman father, he did not venture to make the slightest suggestion to her, but referred the suitor to her own decision, although no son-in-law could have been more welcome to him than Aquilinus.
But Eugenia herself had had her eye upon him secretly for many a long day; for he was the most stately, most illustrious, and most gallant man in Alexandria, and, what was more, had the reputation of a man of intelligence and heart.
Yet she received the enamoured consul in complete calm and dignity, with her parchment rolls about her, and her Hyacinths behind her chair. The one wore an azure-blue, the other a rose-red, robe, and she herself one of dazzling white. A stranger would have been uncertain whether he saw three fair, tender boys, or three fresh, blooming maidens before him.