posed for payment. Manifestly this lady did not
'chameleon' her pen from the colour of her audience: she was not of the
uniformed rank and file marching to drum and fife as gallant interpreters
of popular appetite, and going or gone to soundlessness and the icy
shades.

Touches inward are not absent: 'To have the sense of the eternal in life
is a short flight for the soul. To have had it, is the soul's vitality.'
And also: 'Palliation of a sin is the hunted creature's refuge and final
temptation. Our battle is ever between spirit and flesh. Spirit must
brand the flesh, that it may live.'

You are entreated to repress alarm. She was by preference light-handed;
and her saying of oratory, that 'It is always the more impressive for the
spice of temper which renders it untrustworthy,' is light enough. On
Politics she is rhetorical and swings: she wrote to spur a junior
politician: 'It is the first business of men, the school to mediocrity,
to the covetously ambitious a sty, to the dullard his amphitheatre, arms
of Titans to the desperately enterprising, Olympus to the genius.' What a
woman thinks of women, is the test of her nature. She saw their existing
posture clearly, yet believed, as men disincline to do, that they grow.
She says, that 'In their judgements upon women men are females, voices of
the present (sexual) dilemma.' They desire to have 'a still woman; who
can make a constant society of her pins and needles.' They create by
stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness. 'We live alone,
and do not much feel it till we are visited.' Love is presumably the
visitor. Of the greater loneliness of women, she says: 'It is due to the
prescribed circumscription of their minds, of which they become aware in
agitation. Were the walls about them beaten down, they would understand
that solitariness is a common human fate and the one chance of growth,
like space for timber.' As to the sensations of women after the beating
down of the walls, she owns that the multitude of the timorous would
yearn in shivering affright for the old prison-nest, according to the
sage prognostic of men; but the flying of a valiant few would form a
vanguard. And we are informed that the beginning of a motive life with
women must be in the head, equally with men (by no means a truism when
she wrote). Also that 'men do not so much fear to lose the hearts of
thoughtful women as their strict attention to their graces.' The present
market is wha