"I believe there are not many. But that is another question. And I do believe that an interest in universal questions is a pis-aller with most women."
"You have become an apostate. You speak quite differently from what you wrote a year ago."
"Yes, I have become very humble, because I am more sincere. Of course I believe in certain women, in certain choice spirits. But would the majority not always remain feminine, just women and weak?"
"Not with a sensible training."
"Yes, I believe that it lies in that, in the training...."
"Of the child, of the girl."
"I believe that I have never been educated and that this constitutes my weakness."
"Our girls should be told when still very young of the struggle that lies before them."
"You are right. We—my friends, my sisters and I—had the 'safety' of marriage impressed upon us at the earliest possible moment. Do you know whom I think the most to be pitied? Our parents! They honestly believed that they were having us taught all that was necessary. And now, at this moment, they must see that they did not divine the future correctly and that their training, their education, was no education at all, because they failed to inform their children of the struggle which was being waged right before their eyes. It is our parents that are to be pitied. They can mend nothing now. They see us—girls, young women of twenty to thirty—overwhelmed by life; and they have not given us the strength for it. They kept us sheltered as long as possible under the paternal wing; and then they began to think of our marriage, not in order to get rid of us, but with a view to our happiness, our safety and our future. We are indeed unfortunate, we girls and women who were not, like our younger sisters, told of the struggle that lay just before us; but I believe that we may still have hope in our youth and that our parents are unhappier and more to be pitied than we, because they have nothing more to hope for and because they must secretly confess that they went astray in their love for their children. They were still educating us according to the past, while the future was already so near at hand. I pity our parents and I could almost love them better for that reason than I ever did before."