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A BIOGRAPHY
267
spiritually she was racked by the two great claims now
pressing upon her—the one requiring her to finish an
intellectual problem, the other demanding her
surrender to the new and powerful passion which possessed
her. It is a conflict which every one must undergo in
some degree who gives himself up to creative work.
This is one of the strongest objections that can be
made to intellectual talent in woman, because the
exercise of it prevents her from throwing herself entirely
into matters of affection, such as every man demands
of his wife.
For Sonya it was in any case a terrible trial to feel
that her work stood in the way between her and the
man to whom she would fain have devoted her every
thought. She felt dimly, though she never gave it
expression in words, that his love was chilled by seeing
her, just when they were most closely drawn together,
engrossed by a scheme which perhaps seemed to him
a mere ambitious striving for honor and distinction,
arising from pure vanity.
Such an honor naturally does not increase a woman’s
value in men’s eyes. A singer or an actress, covered
with laurels, will often find the way to a man’s heart
in spite of her celebrity, as Sönya often remarked. A
beautiful woman is admired for her superior beauty;
but the woman who studies seriously until her eyes are
red and her brow wrinkled, in order to win an academic
prize—what is there in that to catch a man’s fancy 1
Sönya said to herself, with bitterness and irony, that
she had acted unwarrantably! She ought, she thought,
to have sacrificed her ambition and vanity for that
which was so much more to her than worldly success.
But still she could not do it. To withdraw at the very
verge of success would have been to give the world a
striking proof of woman’s incompetence. The force of
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