scene with a soured, scornful look.
For human joy, as for human grief, she had little sympathy. Life had no
Saturnalian holidays left for her. Some memory in her past had poisoned
the well-springs of her social being. Hopes and objects she had
still, but out of the wrecks of the natural and healthful existence of
womanhood, those objects and hopes stood forth exaggerated, intense, as
are the ruling passions in monomania. A bad woman is popularly said
to be worse than a wicked man. If so, partly because women, being more
solitary, brood more unceasingly over cherished ideas, whether good or
evil; partly also, for the same reason that makes a wicked gentleman,
who has lost caste and character, more irreclaimable than a wicked
clown, low-born and lowbred, namely, that in proportion to the loss of
shame is the gain in recklessness: but principally, perhaps, because in
extreme wickedness there is necessarily a distortion of the reasoning
faculty; and man, accustomed from the cradle rather to reason than to
feel, has that faculty more firm against abrupt twists and lesions than
it is in woman; where virtue may have left him, logic may still linger;
and he may decline to push evil to a point at which it is clear to his
understanding that profit vanishes and punishment rests; while woman,
once abandoned to ill, finds sufficient charm in its mere excitement,
and, regardless of consequences, where the man asks, "Can I?" raves
out, "I will!" Thus man may be criminal through cupidity, vanity, love,
jealousy, fear, ambition; rarely in civilized, that is, reasoning life,
through hate and revenge; for hate is a profitless investment, and
revenge a ruinous speculation. But when women are thoroughly depraved
and hardened, nine times out of ten it is hatred or revenge that makes
them so. Arabella Crane had not, however, attained to that last state
of wickedness, which, consistent in evil, is callous to remorse; she
was not yet unsexed. In her nature was still that essence, "varying and
mutable," which distinguishes woman while womanhood is left to her. And
now, as she sat gazing on the throng below, her haggard mind recoiled
perhaps from the conscious shadow of the Evil Principle which, invoked
as an ally, remains as a destroyer. Her dark front relaxed; she moved in
her seat uneasily. "Must it be always thus?" she muttered,--"always this
hell here! Even now, if in one large pardon I could include the undoer,
the earth, myself, and again b