With them may be grouped those women who, by their canonization of the unimportant, construct heavily burdened but utterly fruitless lives.
They laboriously pad out their days with trivial things, vanities, shams, and shadows, to which they give the serious undivided attention which should be bestowed only on real enterprises.
There are others who seek soporifics, release from a hearty tackling of their individual situations, in absorbing work, a work which perhaps fills their minds, but which is mere occupation--something to make them forget--not an art for art's sake, not labor for its useful fruits, but a protective, separating shield to shut out the insistent demands of life in the place where they find themselves.
All of these women are rightfully classed as irresponsible, whether they are moved by vanity, indolence, purposelessness, social blindness, or, most pitiful, a sense of the emptiness of life unattended by the imagination which reveals the sources from which life is filled.

No one of them is building a "House of Life" for herself.

They are building gimcrack palaces, gingerbread cottages, structures which the first full blast of life will level to the ground.
These women are not peculiar to city or to country.

They are scattered nation-wide.

You find them on farms and in mansions, in offices and in academic halls.