m his leaders, retaliated in his
blind, common-sense way. "What does the woman want?" he said. "Is her
head turned with the Tulieries and Marlborough House? Does she think
herself made for a throne? Why does she not lecture for women's rights?
Why not go on the stage? If she cannot be contented like other people,
what need is there for abusing us just because she feels herself no
taller than we are? What does she expect to get from her sharp tongue?
What does she know, any way?"

Mrs. Lee certainly knew very little. She had read voraciously and
promiscuously one subject after another. Ruskin and Taine had danced
merrily through her mind, hand in hand with Darwin and Stuart Mill,
Gustave Droz and Algernon Swinburne. She had even laboured over the
literature of her own country. She was perhaps, the only woman in New
York who knew something of American history. Certainly she could not
have repeated the list of Presidents in their order, but she knew that
the Constitution divided the government into Executive, Legislative, and
Judiciary; she was aware that the President, the Speaker, and the
Chief Justice were important personages, and instinctively she wondered
whether they might not solve her problem; whether they were the shade
trees which she saw in her dreams.

Here, then, was the explanation of her restlessness, discontent,
ambition,--call it what you will. It was the feeling of a passenger on
an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in
the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her
own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the
massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity
of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great
American mystery of democracy and government. She cared little where
her pursuit might lead her, for she put no extravagant value upon life,
having already, as she said, exhausted at least two lives, and being
fairly hardened to insensibility in the process. "To lose a husband and
a baby," said she, "and keep one's courage and reason, one must become
very hard or very soft. I am now pure steel. You may beat my heart with
a trip-hammer and it will beat the trip-hammer back again."

Perhaps after exhausting the political world she might try again
elsewhere; she did not pretend to say where she might then go, or what
she should do; but at present she meant to see what amusemen