The reason novelists nearly always fail in depicting women when they make them act, is that they let them do what they have observed some woman has done at sometime or another.

And that is where they make a mistake; for a woman will never do again what has been done before.

It is this uncertainty that causes women, considered as materials for fiction, to be so interesting to themselves and to others.
As the fall went on and the winter, Ruth did not distinguish herself greatly at the Fallkill Seminary as a student, a fact that apparently gave her no anxiety, and did not diminish her enjoyment of a new sort of power which had awakened within her..