Page:Letters of a Javanese princess, by Raden Adjeng Kartini, 1921.djvu/86

 creature of a lower order than himself. Had she not often heard his mother, his aunts, and all the women of his acquaintance say to him in scornful, disdainful tones, "A girl is only a girl"? It is through woman herself that man first learns to scorn woman. Ni's blood boiled when- ever she heard deprecating words about girls spoken by a woman.

"Women are nothing — women are created for men, for their pleasure; they can do with them as they will," sounded brutally in her ears, and irritating as the laugh of Satan. Her eyes shot fire, her fists clenched, and she pressed her lips tightly together in impotent distress. "No, No," cried her fast beating little heart, "We are human just as much as men. Oh, let me learn. Loose my bonds! Only give me the chance, and I will show that I am a human being, a woman just as good as a man." She writhed and twisted, but the chains were strong and locked tightly around her tender wrists and ankles. She wounded herself, but she did not break them.

Too early ripened child, at an age when a young head should only be filled with dreams of merry play, she was busy with sombre dark thoughts about the sad things in life. It could not have been otherwise; she was not deaf nor blind and lived in the midst of a civilization which took no account of youth and sensitive feelings. Roughly the young tender eyes were opened to the realities of life, in all their coarseness, ugliness and cruelty. From her parents themselves she never heard a harsh word that would have shocked her pure mind or wounded her sensitive heart, but she did not live only with her parents.

O Death! why are you called terrible, you who release mankind from this cruel life? Ni would have followed you thankfully and with joy. She had no one to show her what was lofty and beautiful in life, and that everything was not low and vile. Ni loved her father with her —64—