Youth_ Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene - G. Stanley Hall

calls and they see each other often. Now she is clad from head to foot in an
armor of cold politeness, now vanity and now passion seem uppermost in their
meetings. She wonders if a certain amount of sin, like air, is necessary to a man
to sustain life. Finally they vow mutual love and Pietro leaves, and she begins to
fear that she has cherished illusions or been insulted; is torments at things unsaid
or of her spelling in French. She coughs and for three days has a new idea that
she is going to die; prays and prostrates herself sixty times, one for each bead in
her rosary, touching the floor with her forehead every time; wonders if God
takes intentions into account; resolves to read the New Testament, but can not
find one and reads Dumas instead. In novel-reading she imagines herself the
heroine of every scene; sees her lover and they plan their mode of life together
and at last kiss each other, but later she feels humiliated, chilled, doubts if it is
real love; studies the color of her lips to see if they have changed; fears that she
has compromised herself; has eye symptoms that make her fear blindness. Once
on reading the Testament she smiled and clasped her hands, gazed upward, was
no longer herself but in ecstasy; she makes many programs for life; is haunted by
the phrase "We live but once"; wants to live a dozen lives in one, but feels that
she does not live one-fourth of a life; has several spells of solitary illumination.
At other times she wishes to be the center of a salon and imagines herself to be
so. She soars on poets' wings, but often has hell in her heart; slowly love is
vowed henceforth to be a word without meaning to her. Although she suffers
from ennui, she realizes that women live only from sixteen to forty and cannot
bear the thought of losing a moment of her life; criticizes her mother; scorns
marriage and child-bearing, which any washerwoman can attain, but pants for
glory; now hates, now longs to see new faces; thinks of disguising herself as a
poor girl and going out to seek her fortunes; thinks her mad vanity is her devil;
that her ambitions are justified by no results; hates moderation in anything,
would have intense and constant excitement or absolute repose; at fifteen
abandons her idea of the duke but wants an idol, and finally decides to live for
fame; studies her shoulders, hips, bust, to gauge her success in life; tries target-
shooting, hits every time and feels it to be fateful; at times despises her mother
because she is so easily influenced by her; meets another man whose affection
for her she thinks might be as reverent as religion and who never profaned the
purity of his life by a thought, but finally drops him because the possible
disappointment would be unbearable; finds that the more unhappy any one is for
love of us the happier we are; wonders why she has weeping spells; wonders
what love that people talk so much about really is, and whether she is ever to
know. One night, at the age of seventeen, she has a fit of despair which vents
itself in moans until arising, she seizes the dining-room clock, rushes out and