most
destructive, might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure, and that should
incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and happy life. But, as matters
now were, I felt myself (and having a decided tendency towards the actual, I
never liked to feel it) getting quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the
existing state of the world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a
world it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be. It was
impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything in
nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the crust of the
Earth, in many places, was broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving;
that it was a day of crisis, and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex.
Our great globe floated in the atmosphere of infinite space like an
unsubstantial bubble. No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live
exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically
returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new
observation from that old stand-point.
    It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with the
conservatives, the writers of the North American Review, the merchants, the
politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those respectable old blockheads, who
still, in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one
or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday-morning.
    The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness; and as for the
sisterhood, I had serious thoughts of kissing them all round, but forbore to do
so, because, in all such general salutations, the penance is fully equal to the
pleasure. So I kissed none of them, and nobody, to say the truth, seemed to
expect it.
    »Do you wish me,« I said to Zenobia, »to announce, in town, and at the
watering-places, your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the rights of
women?«
    »Women possess no rights,« said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile; »or,
at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have the force to
exercise them.«
    She gave me her hand, freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought, with a
pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled light of joy in them,
on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate