be withering virgins, may be childless matrons, may be
unhusbanded wives. Wandering in the vast realm which they are exhorted to
call their own, for the additional attractiveness it gives them, an
unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat audaciously cross the borderland
a single step into the public road of the vast realm of thinking. Once
there, and but a single step on the road, she is a rebel against man's
law for her sex. Nor is it urgent on her that she should think defiantly
in order to feel herself the rebel. She may think submissively; with a
heart (the enlarged, the scientifically plumped, the pasture of epicurean
man), with her coveted heart in revolt, and from the mere act of thinking
at all.

Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the
near-to-happiness ratings over-night. She thinned her lips, and her
cheeks glowed. An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her. The
choice now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think. She took
the latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women
educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held
a candle in a windy darkness. She saw no Justice there. The sensational
immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required for
the true sublime. And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any realm!
Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they feel
when it is refused them. When they know they feel, they have begun to
reflect. The void of Justice is a godless region. Women, to whom the
solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes of
their storm, ask themselves whether they are God's creatures or man's.
The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their
human masters. Young women, animated by the passions their feeling bosoms
of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish an
abstract justice from a concrete. They are of the tribe too long
hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract. So it is with them, that
their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of
boys. He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter--the
Biblical Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to
confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance. By such a
maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth. If women
can only believe in some soul of justice, they will