But in spite of their aridity and inflexibility of principle how much more human are even these feminists than the “ill-natured” aunts of earlier times who became ill-natured exactly because their temperament was of the kind mentioned above, but who could find no sphere of operation for their passionate longing for activity. One or another was perhaps burning with ambition. For there are women as well as men who can live only as pagan gods, in the blaze and perfume of sacrificial fires. In their youth these ambitious natures could be satisfied by triumphs in social life. But later the passion became a fire in a powder cask and occasioned incessant explosions. Now it is the electric motive power for an activity of general utility. The “aunts” of the earlier time who felt themselves always overlooked and injured are most easily recognised again in the literary and artistic field to which daily bread or ambition now urges many women, who endeavour to compensate by energetic work for the talent which nature denied them. Since these women are ordinarily not people of understanding but of feeling, they must in a double sense be dissatisfied with a life which in addition is, in most cases, still filled with economic cares and the humiliations arising therefrom. And yet in spite of all, how much richer is their life to-day than it would have been fifty years ago when they would have been obliged to sit and draw their needles through interminable pieces of handwork, after ugly patterns and for unnecessary uses, or to compose sentimental birthday verses for persons whom they abominated.
Yet there are always those women natures who, in the past, had the qualifications for a real “dear aunt,” who gently calmed the conflicts and filled the gaps in the home of which they had become members. The most tender and sensitive of these modern women, who, rain or shine, year in year out, hasten to and from a work indifferent to them at heart, not infrequently breathe a sigh of longing for those times when, as “aunts,” they could have received and imparted warmth in a home. But then again there come moments when they know how to value the independence which puts them in a position to give help where otherwise there would be none; when for example they can send a nephew to college, or a friend to a sanatarium, or provide their mother with a nurse, which they themselves can not be.