 finding it in books of
fiction composed for payment. Manifestly this lady did not chameleon her pen
from the colour of her audience: she was not of the uniformed rank and file
marching to drum and fife as gallant interpreters of popular appetite, and going
or gone to soundlessness and the icy shades.
    Touches inward are not absent: »To have the sense of the eternal in life is
a short flight for the soul. To have had it, is the soul's vitality.«
    And also: »Palliation of a sin is the hunted creature's refuge and final
temptation. Our battle is ever between spirit and flesh. Spirit must brand the
flesh, that it may live.«
    You are entreated to repress alarm. She was by preference light-handed; and
her saying of oratory, that »It is always the more impressive for the spice of
temper which renders it untrustworthy,« is light enough.
    On Politics she is rhetorical and swings: she wrote to spur a junior
politician: »It is the first business of men, the school to mediocrity, to the
covetously ambitious a sty, to the dullard his amphitheatre, arms of Titans to
the desperately enterprising, Olympus to the genius.«
    What a woman thinks of women, is the test of her nature. She saw their
existing posture clearly, yet believed, as men disincline to do, that they grow.
She says, that »In their judgements upon women men are females, voices of the
present (sexual) dilemma.« They desire to have »a still woman, who can make a
constant society of her pins and needles.« They create by stoppage a volcano,
and are amazed at its eruptiveness. »We live alone, and do not much feel it till
we are visited.« Love is presumeably the visitor. Of the greater loneliness of
women, she says: »It is due to the prescribed circumscription of their minds, of
which they become aware in agitation. Were the walls about them beaten down,
they would understand that solitariness is a common human fate and the one
chance of growth, like space for timber.« As to the sensations of women after
the beating down of the walls, she owns that the multitude of the timorous would
yearn in shivering affright for the old prison-nest, according to the sage
prognostic of men; but the flying of a valiant few would form a vanguard. And we
are informed that the beginning of a motive life with women must be in the head,
equally with men (by no means a truism when she wrote).
