Upon young women there certainly is.
The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry and be bound to the end.
It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.
But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.
The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite! The world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.
Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected, developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana, deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her--these were the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the hypocrite world.
One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have loved--whom?
An ideal.

Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of the yoke?
She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress! The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated.

The regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical sentence of death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it.

She could have loved.

Good-bye to that! A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her.