Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/207

 mother's footsteps, had convinced Ana that she was a great deal too delicate for a normal existence. This theory received complete verification in the report of the doctor who examined the candidates for the nursing school and rejected her because of a heart murmur. Ana, influenced by her aunt's gloomy foreboding, was now convinced that she was too frail to bear children, or at least not more than one child at some very distant date. She became a church member, gave up dancing, clung closer to the group of younger girls in the pastor's school and to her foster home, the neurasthenic product of a physical defect, a small, isolated family group and the pastor's school.

These girls all represented the deviants from the pattern in one direction; they were those who demanded a different or improved environment, who rejected the traditional choices. At any time, they, like all deviants, might come into real conflict with the group. That they did not was an accident of environment. The younger girls in the pastor's group as yet showed fewer signs of being influenced by their slightly artificial environment. They were chaste where they would not otherwise have been chaste, they had friends outside their relationship group whom they would otherwise have viewed with suspicion, they paid more attention to their lessons. They still had not acquired a desire to substitute any other career for the traditional one of marriage. This was, of course, partly due to the fact that the pastor's school was simply one influence in their lives. The girls