, made by
her own hands, (not very skilfully, if the truth must be told,) and, whenever I
seemed inclined to converse, would sit by my bedside, and talk with so much
vivacity as to add several gratuitous throbs to my pulse. Her poor little
stories and tracts never half did justice to her intellect; it was only the lack
of a fitter avenue that drove her to seek development in literature. She was
made (among a thousand other things that she might have been) for a
stump-oratress. I recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her mind was full of
weeds. It startled me, sometimes, in my state of moral, as well as bodily
faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy; she made no
scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering them as with a
breeze from her fan. A female reformer, in her attacks upon society, has an
instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is inclined to aim directly at
that spot. Especially, the relation between the sexes is naturally among the
earliest to attract her notice.
    Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her dress
could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her presence. The
image of her form and face should have been multiplied all over the earth. It
was wronging the rest of mankind, to retain her as the spectacle of only a few.
The stage would have been her proper sphere. She should have made it a point of
duty, moreover, to sit endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferably to
the latter; because the cold decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost
scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with her
material perfection, in its entireness. I know not well how to express, that the
native glow of coloring in her cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round
arms, and what was visible of her full bust - in a word, her womanliness
incarnated - compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not quite
the privilege of modesty to gaze at her. Illness and exhaustion, no doubt, had
made me morbidly sensitive.
    I noticed - and wondered how Zenobia contrived it - that she had always a
new flower in her hair. And still it was a hot-house flower - an outlandish
flower - a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have sprung passionately
out of a soil, the very weeds of which would be fervid and spicy. Unlike as was
the flower of each successive day
