In escaping vital experiences, the woman can at least recognize the fact that she also escapes the anxieties and troubles that are inseparable from family life. She will probably be lonely; but, on the other hand, when she wishes it she can be alone. In writing to a friend, who had lost his little daughter, Cicero says that all men would wish children were it not for the anxiety that they inevitably bring.
To put it more positively, the celibate woman retains her freedom of action. Through study, travel, art, science or society, she may reach a degree of self-realization not always attained by her sister who marries. Into her work she can carry much of the enthusiasm and devotion which, as wife and mother, she might lavish on husband and children.
The desire for service, which lies so deep in the nature of all good women, can often be more fully realized in a life of personal freedom than in one of marriage. At least there may be a different realization of very great value to the individual and to society. Such women as Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams have brought gifts of service to mankind far beyond what they would probably have given in their own homes. Each of these women probably recognized her personal loss; but many devoted wives and mothers have also recognized their loss through inability to enter into the wider service of public life. Unto no mortal is it given to live all the possibilities of life.
But more important than any of these compensations we have named is the power we all possess to live life vicariously. Our real living is never in the mere possession and use of things, but in what we think and feel about them. Lower animals live in facts; man lives in his ideas and ideals. All of life's values must be found on the way; when we arrive we are always in danger of becoming unconscious and so losing what we came to get.
This is why art and literature have always had to find their characters in the struggling classes, the poor and the rich. The smug middle classes and the comfortably rich have the facts of existence; but they do not know it. The universal contempt of those who know for such unconscious living finds expression in the terms bourgeoise, philistines and bromides.
On the other hand, struggling and self-conscious groups always attract and interest us. Bohemia is poor; it lacks the facts of property; but it has the most alluring of all festivals and immortal banquets. Who, that has a soul as well as a stomach, would not turn from a banquet of facts at twenty dollars a plate, with dull unconsciousness of life in the people, to a group of dreamers and wits with very modest fare and twenty-dollar talk at table?
Locke's Beloved Vagabond lost all the facts of life, fame, money,
