Herself an intellectual, and a freed spirit, she had no trust in any of the new professional and technical careers into which she saw women crowding.

Sex seemed to her now as always the dominating fact of life.

Votes did not matter, or degrees, or the astonishing but quite irrelevant fact, as the papers announced it, that women should now be able not only to fit but to plan a battleship.

Love, and a child's clinging mouth, and the sweetness of a Darby and Joan old age, for these all but the perverted women had always lived, and would always live.
She saw in her Helena the strong beginnings of sex.

But she also realized the promise of intelligence, of remarkable brain development, and it seemed to her of supreme importance that sex should have the first innings in her child's life.
"If she goes to college at once, as soon as I am gone, and her brain and her ambition are appealed to, before she has time to fall in love, she will develop on that side, prematurely--marvellously--and the rest will atrophy.