her way serenely, with her malady in the blood. When
the skin bears witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is
a short convulsion. She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior
members: the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and
retains; rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence,
and she lives all in the present. Her subjects are the mixed
Subservient; among her rebellious are earth's advanced, who have cold a
morning on their foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they
would but shame and purify by other methods than the druggist. She
loves nothing. Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious. On that merit she
subsists.

The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the
use of the rhetorician's brass instrument. As she is one of the Powers
giving life and death, one may be excused. This tremendous queen of the
congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid
on quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to
misery and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad;
and particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of
women. We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to
gratify them. She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile
themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she
may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she
will only give men her half-the-world's assistance to uplift the fabric
comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind
in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not
by any means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are
privately exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown
boys--the brisker at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the
fiction.

In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its
royal laxity, to rigidity. Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter
of jest, and the sinner exposed stood 'sola' to receive the brand. A
beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband's countenance if she was
to take one of the permanent steps in public places. The party of Lady
Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge
celestial bolts and sulphur oil on the head of an impudent, underbred,
ambitious young slut, whose arts had bewitched a distinguished nobleman
not young in years at least