We lie
to our children--in the interests of morality.
After a time, in the intervals between doing her journalistic work
and nursing Alan's baby, Herminia found leisure to write a novel.
It was seriously meant, of course, but still it was a novel. That
is every woman's native idea of literature. It reflects the
relatively larger part which the social life plays in the existence
of women. If a man tells you he wants to write a book, nine times
out of ten he means a treatise or argument on some subject that
interests him. Even the men who take in the end to writing novels
have generally begun with other aims and other aspirations, and
have only fallen back upon the art of fiction in the last resort as
a means of livelihood. But when a woman tells you she wants to
write a book, nine times out of ten she means she wants to write a
novel. For that task nature has most often endowed her richly.
Her quicker intuitions, her keener interest in social life, her
deeper insight into the passing play of emotions and of motives,
enable her to paint well the complex interrelations of every-day
existence.
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