SEX-EDUCATION 175- 



forties or fifties, leaving on the whole only 

 those who had the right pre-adolescent be- 

 ginning and adolescent opportunity still 

 efficient after the great climacteric period of 

 the early sixties. 



This hypothesis, even difficult to express, is 

 we admit, also still fully to verify; yet we 

 submit it, both as giving cause to think of 

 our pedagogic process, and hope of its im- 

 provement. This, too, at the very highest 

 levels, for what we have said for art and 

 science may also be justified; and perhaps 

 not less clearly from the lives of men of letters. 



And must not all this apply perhaps even 

 more plainly to woman ? Does not she need 

 an adolescence of even more rest and happi- 

 ness, and even less strain? What, too, of 

 her period of highest development? not 

 even of young beauty, divine though its 

 phases be and each entrancing in turn, from 

 Artemis to Aphrodite, and thence to the 

 bright perfection of Pallas, to the full-blown 

 rose of Hera. Beyond all these it is the ageing 

 Demeter, the matron, corn-mother and bread- 

 giver, who most fully presides throughout 

 civilisation ; while beyond her again, past the 

 later climacteric, and in full old age, there does 

 at times and should more often arise that 

 wisdom of the Sibyl, which penetrates beyond 

 even that of the sage. 



Such high types of woman's originality and 

 intelligence, though rarer than those of the 

 able man-educated woman one increasingly 

 meets, are natural and normal for all that, 

 since they remain also more organically 

 feminine, with their keen and subtle wits 



