"
Miss Royden's memoirs, if they are ever written, would have, I think,
the rather unusual merit of pleasing both saints and sinners; the saints
by the depth and beauty of her spiritual experience, the sinners by her
freedom from every shade of cant and by her strong, almost masculine,
sympathy with the difficulties of our human nature. Catherine the Great,
in her colloquies with the nervous and hesitating Diderot, used to say,
"Proceed; _between men_ all is allowable." One may affirm of Miss Royden
that she is at once a true woman and a great man.
It is this perfect balance of the masculine and feminine in her
personality which makes her so effective a public speaker, so powerful
an influence in private discourse, and so safe a writer on questions of
extreme delicacy, such as the problem of sex. She is always on the
level of the whole body of humanity, a complete person, a veritable
human being, neither a member of a class nor the representative of a
sex.
Perhaps it may be permitted to mention two events in her life which help
one to understand how it is she has come to play this masculine and
feminine part in public life.
One day, a day of torrential rain, when she was a girl living in her
father's house in Cheshire, she and her sister saw a carriage and pair
coming through the park towards the house. The coachman and footman on
the box were soaking wet, and kept their heads down to avoid the sting
of the rain in their eyes.
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