cognized 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 to
the preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich
beauty of the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn;
so fit, indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem, in a
happy exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning Zenobia's
head. It might be that my feverish fantasies clustered themselves
about this peculiarity, and caused it to look more gorgeous and
wonderful than if beheld with temperate eyes. In the height of my
illness, as I well recollect, I went so fa