have repudiated any responsibility for
the term as applied to her; she would have simply failed to understand
the term itself. There was no least affectation in this. Throughout her
life of sixty years, as I gather, she acted never once upon principle.
Impulse and inclination dominated her, and she would indulge many
primitive instincts without a thought of conventions. Yet she was not
selfish; or, at least, only in the self-contained and self-protective
meaning of the word. She was a perfect animal, conscious of her supreme
brute caste, shrewd, resourceful, and the plain embodiment of truth.

Miss Groom had, I think, a boundless feeling of fellowship with beauty of
whatever description; but no least touch of that sorrow of affection
which, in its very humanity, is divine. Her unswerving creed was that
woman was the inheritrix of the earth, the reversion of which she had
wilfully mortgaged to an alien race, and that she had bartered her
material immortality for a sensation. For man she had no vulgar and
jealous contempt; but she feared and shrank from him as something moved
by scruples with which she had no sympathy. She understood the world of
Nature, and could respond to its bloodless caresses and passions. She
could _not_ understand the moodiness that dwells upon a grievance, or
that would sell its birthright of joy for a pitiful memory.

Yet (and here I must speak with discretion, for I have no sufficient data
to go upon) there was that of contradictoriness in her character that, I
have reason to believe, she had borne children, and had even been right
and particular as to their temporal welfare until such time as, in the
nature of things, they were of an age to make shift for themselves. This,
virtually, I know to be the case; and that, once quit of the primitive
maternal responsibility, she gave no more thought to them than a thrush
gives to its fledglings when she has educated them to their first
flights, and to the useful knack of cracking a snail on a stone.

My own feeling about Dinah Groom was that she had "thrown back" a long
way over the heads of heredity, and that, in her fearlessness, in her
undegenerate physique, in the animal regularity of her face and form, she
presented to modern days a startling aboriginal type.

Beautiful--save in the sense of symmetry--she can never have been to the
ordinary man; inasmuch as she would subscribe to no arbitrary standard of
his dictating. She had a high, rich colou