person who never did anybody
any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and intelligent, nay,
a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of society, fail to
inspire interest, love, and devotion? Because of the _reversed current_
in the flow of thought and emotion. The red heart sends all its
instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed, chilled, blanched, and
so become pure reason, which is just exactly what we do not want of
woman as woman. The current should run the other way. The nice, calm,
cold thought, which in women shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly
know it as thought, should always travel to the lips _via_ the heart. It
does so in those women whom all love and admire. It travels the wrong
way in the Model. That is the reason why the Little Gentleman said, "I
hate her, I hate her." That is the reason why the young man John called
her the "old fellah," and banished her to the company of the great
Unpresentable. That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her
to pieces with scalpel and forceps. That is the reason why the young
girl whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which lie
sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes. I can see her, as she
sits between this estimable and most correct of personages and the
misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man on the
other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she speaks, and
looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain in them at which
her soul could quiet its thirst.

Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and high
culture. It is not

"The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr with Aurora playing,"

when the two meet

----"on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"

that claim such women as their offspring. It is rather the east wind, as
it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a clear-eyed wintry
noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England ice-quarry.--Don't throw
up your cap now, and hurrah as if this were giving up everything, and
turning against the best growth of our latitudes,--the daughters of the
soil. The brain-women never interest us like the heart-women; white
roses please less than red. But our Northern seasons have a narrow green
streak of spring, as well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have
a glowing band of summ