profession of the slave girls of the palaces, or of bondswomen put up for sale. For this reason they were counted among the despised occupations, although they belong to the fine arts, which open to woman the path of creative activity. The craft of dancing, singing, and acting by women developed in the West, and free and cultivated women took it up; but dancers, singers, and actresses have remained exposed to moral decline and to servitude, because with them the profession becomes a means of display and self-exhibi-tion for the sake of gain and empty fame, strengthening in them the powerful inclination toward adorn-ment and the worship of their own bodies. Few among them have known — like Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt — how to reconcile per-sonal freedom with the profession, and to make of the latter a true and pure art, not an instrument for extorting money and preying upon the hearts of men.

We come now to feminine types that existed in the past and still exist today: the narcissistic or egoistic woman, who worships her own self because she finds nothing else to worship, and busies herself with her adornment and her clothes because she finds nothing else to busy her. She is infatuated with displaying herself in society and in the salons, after the fashion of decorated dolls; the mirror, the implements of adornment, people's glances and their opinion of her beauty hold her in bondage. She lives in perpetual anxiety, longing to draw the eye and win the approval of others, though she gives others no weight, for she sees nothing in existence but herself. She lives out her life wretched, because she stirs up hatred and envy around her and strives, to no avail, to keep a beauty that is quick to fade.

The second type: the woman enslaved by the love of a man, as the egoist is enslaved by the love of herself. It is not strange that a woman should drown in the love of some person — in love of husband or lover or children —

spending herself in this love and making of it an outlet for her feelings and her pent-up energies; for in her narrow, closed world she is more governed by emotion than man, and more exposed than he to melting away into another person, of whom she makes a god to be worshipped.

The third type: the mystic woman, who melts away into the love of God. History shows us many examples of devout women whose souls the divine love filled, and at whose hands the marvels of mysticism came to pass: Angela of Foligno, Saint Teresa, Marie Alacoque, Saint Catherine, and so on — ascetic women whose lives

were an astonishing sacrifice, a service that knew no rest, and an excess in the mortification of self.

Three kinds of love: love of self; love of another person and dissolution in him; love of God and union with Him — woman takes them as an escape or a refuge in which she drowns an anxious or empty or tormented soul. And in all three cases she lives in

a state of illusion and severs her tie with reality, and the illusion leads her to enslavement and the extinction of personality. It goes without saying that none of these kinds of extreme love, in which the self is drowned, can be counted a natural