If
women can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they
belong to God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they
will set the one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other,
urging them unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and
his laws altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who
shines in thought. It is a manner whereby the desperately harried
among these creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an
agreeable, almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.

There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
sensible to the pulses of his audience. Justice compels at times. In
truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
unexplained. Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft
brown of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.

Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him. Her
will could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her
to pique the mailed veteran. Every poor innocent little bit of an art
had been exhausted. Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually
slave. A luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly
enfranchised set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord
Adderwood; Sir John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May,
notorious wife of a fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and
other ladies, other gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not
yet paired: gossip raged. Aminta was of a disposition too generously
cordial to let her be the rigorous critic of people with whom she was
in touch. But her mind knew relief when she recollected that her humble
little school-mate, Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in
old days, was coming up to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a
week. However much a slave and an unloved woman, she could be a constant
and protecting friend. Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little
Selina. She thought of his remarks about the modest-minded girl after
first seeing her. From that she str