these appointed keepers of
the sanctuary household, who may 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.