had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our
evil-fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded,
trodden, mud-stained: and it alarmed her lest she should be at heart one
out of the fold.

She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing with the
pulsations of a compassion that she took for her reflective survey. The
next time she saw Dartrey Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the
man who might be spoken to; and by a woman: though not by a girl; not
spoken to by her. The throb of the impulse precipitating speech subsided
to a dumb yearning. He noticed her look: he was unaware of the human sun
in the girl's eyes taking an image of him for permanent habitation in her
breast. That face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the blue
smile on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not mean
hardness, she could have vowed. O that some woman, other than the unhappy
woman herself, would speak the words denied to a girl! He was the man who
would hearken and help. Essential immediate help was to be given besides
the noble benevolence of mind. Novel ideas of manliness and the world's
need for it were printed on her understanding. For what could women do in
aid of a good cause! She fawned: she deemed herself very despicably her
hero's inferior. The thought of him enclosed her. In a prison, the gaoler
is a demi-God-hued bright or black, as it may be; and, by the present
arrangement between the sexes, she, whom the world allowed not to have an
intimation from eye or ear, or from nature's blood-ripeness in commune
with them, of certain matters, which it suffers to be notorious,
necessarily directed her appeal almost in worship to the man, who was the
one man endowed to relieve, and who locked her mouth for shame.

Thus was she, too, being put into her woman's harness of the bit and the
blinkers, and taught to know herself for the weak thing, the gentle
parasite, which the fiction of our civilization expects her, caressingly
and contemptuously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of hero
Comedy of Clowns!--that in the passive she be a rockfortress impregnable,
not to speak of magically encircled. She must also have her feelings; she
must not be an unnatural creature. And she must have a sufficient
intelligence; for her stupidity does not flatter the possessing man. It
is not an organic growth that he desires in his mate, but a happy
composition. You see the world which