God of Youth

She experimented with society-life, the service, music, her faith—to which she intended to devote her life—and even with the love of men in which she did not believe. She meditated on the use to which she should devote that power of youth which is granted only once in a lifetime: that force which gives a woman the power of making herself, or even—as it seemed to her—of making the world, into anything she wishes: should it be to art, to science, to love of a woman, or to practical activities? It is true that some people are devoid of this impulse, and on entering life at once place their necks under the first yoke that offers itself and honestly labour under it for the rest of their lives???But she was too strongly conscious of the presence of that all-powerful God of Youth—of that capacity to be entirely transformed into an aspiration or idea—the capacity to wish and to do—to throw oneself headlong into a bottomless abyss without knowing why or wherefore.