est and most tortuous passages. We know
that she was without belief in her own eloquence, but she was very
eloquent when she reminded Verena how the exquisite weakness of women
had never been their defence, but had only exposed them to sufferings
more acute than masculine grossness can conceive. Their odious partner
had trampled upon them from the beginning of time, and their tenderness,
their abnegation, had been his opportunity. All the bullied wives, the
stricken mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who have lived on
the earth and longed to leave it, passed and repassed before her eyes,
and the interminable dim procession seemed to stretch out a myriad hands
to her. She sat with them at their trembling vigils, listened for the
tread, the voice, at which they grew pale and sick, walked with them by
the dark waters that offered to wash away misery and shame, took with
them, even, when the vision grew intense, the last shuddering leap. She
had analysed to an extraordinary fineness their susceptibility, their
softness; she knew (or she thought she knew) all the possible tortures
of anxiety, of suspense and dread; and she had made up her mind that it
was women, in the end, who had paid for everything. In the last resort
the whole burden of the human lot came upon them; it pressed upon them
far more than on the others, the intolerable load of fate. It was they
who sat cramped and chained to receive it; it was they who had done all
the waiting and taken all the wounds. The sacrifices, the blood, the
tears, the terrors were theirs. Their organism was in itself a challenge
to suffering, and men had practised upon it with an impudence that knew
no bounds. As they were the weakest most had been wrung from them, and
as they were the most generous they had been most deceived. Olive
Chancellor would have rested her case, had it been necessary, on those
general facts; and her simple and comprehensive contention was that the
peculiar wretchedness which had been the very essence of the feminine
lot was a monstrous artificial imposition, crying aloud for redress. She
was willing to admit that women, too, could be bad; that there were many
about the world who were false, immoral, vile. But their errors were as
nothing to their sufferings; they had expiated, in advance, an eternity,
if need be, of misconduct. Olive poured forth these views to her
listening and responsive friend; she presented them again and again, and
there was no l