Passage2
Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following passage.
An eighteenth century wit said of Madame de Stael that since there were no women geniuses, it would be a mistake to call her a woman. Although one would hesitate to call Miss Huang Luying a woman genius, her friends would agree with me that in her heart she was every inch a man, in spite of the fact that she was one of the most feminine persons in appearance.
I an not trying to define the nature of women; but to my mind, one of the marked feminine characteristic is a matter-of- fact mind. Their lives are organized by convenience, seldom by any definite ideals. Unlike men, who are more romantic in nature, they do not like to play with new ideas. For this reason, they have been rightly called the most conservative (保守的) elements in society.
But no one would ever dream of calling Miss Huang a conservative! On the contrary, her life was but one long adventure. She broke many social conventions, because she was earnestly convinced that righteousness (正义) was on her side. Many persons would call her stubborn (固执的). Actually she knew stubbornness was one of her weaknesses. In her novel The Friend on the Seashore, she said of her heroine, whom everyone would recognize to be herself, that she was often foolishly brave. Such self-insight is indeed extremely rare! She was stubborn not in the sense of a spoilt child, but in the sense of a religious enthusiast. She dared to be herself, because she had her own belief. She knew that in living according to her ideals, she could never be wrong, so long as she was sure that she was guided by the true light.
The true light, in this case, was tone other than love, love not as a simple pastime or as the satisfaction of one's physical nature, but as a religion, as life itself. She sacrificed everything for love, first by marrying a man who already had a wife, later by marrying, after the death of her first lover, a man who was at least ten years younger than herself. She quarreled with her mother, and was denied connection with her family, all because love was all.
To those who do not know her personally Miss Huang will perhaps always be remembered as a writer of no mean ability; but to her friends, she will always remain in their memory as a woman who lived and died for love.
What can we learn from Paragraph 1?
