Of course, it is not possible to establish defined categories based on age alone. Some women remain infantile their whole lives; the behaviors we have described are sometimes perpetuated to an advanced age. Nevertheless, on the whole, there is a big difference between the girlish fifteen-year-old and an older girl. The latter is adapted to reality; she scarcely advances on the imaginary level; she is less divided within herself than before. At about eighteen, Marie Bashkirtseff writes: The more I advance in age towards the end of my youth, the more I am covered with indifference. Little agitates me and everything used to agitate me.

Irne Reweliotty comments: To be accepted by men, you have to think and act like them; if you dont, they treat you like a black sheep, and solitude becomes your lot. And I, now, Im fed up with solitude, and I want people not only around me but with me Living now and no longer existing and waiting and dreaming and telling yourself everything within yourself, your mouth shut and your body motionless. 435 And further along: With so much flattery, wooing, and such, I become terribly ambitious. This is no longer the trembling, marvelous happiness of the fifteen-year-old. It is a kind of cold and hard intoxication to take my revenge on life, to climb. I flirt; I play at loving. I do not love I gain in intelligence, in sangfroid, in ordinary lucidity. I lose my heart. It was as if it cracked In two months, I left childhood behind. Approximately the same sound comes from these secrets of a

What a conflict against a mentality that seemed incompatible with this century and the appeals of this century itself! I now have a peaceful feeling. Each new big idea that enters me, instead of provoking a painful upheaval, a destruction, and an incessant reconstruction, adapts marvelously to what is already in me Now I go seamlessly from theoretical thinking to daily life without attempting continuity.17