men!"--how would that sound as a war-cry?

Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male
generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails
me--and if me, then probably many another--when I find myself reading of
the immemorial "victim." It is this which makes Balaustion supreme for
my delight. There is a woman with every noble attribute of womanhood at
its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as
one might say--the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn
now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering--we turn to
Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of
the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and
last, for the paltriest of motives--money. And money in no large,
imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at
all conceived as a theme for tragedy. A dowry, and a tiny one: _this_
created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in _The
Ring and the Book_.

"Another day that finds her living yet,
Little Pompilia, with the patient brow
And lamentable smile on those poor lips,
And, under the white hospital-array,
A flower-like body, to frighten at a bruise
You'd think, yet now, stabbed through and through again,
Alive i' the ruins. 'Tis a miracle.
It seems that when her husband struck her first,
She prayed Madonna just that she might live
So long as to confess and be absolved;
And whether it was that, all her sad life long
Never before successful in a prayer,
This prayer rose with authority too dread--
Or whether because earth was hell to her,
By compensation when the blackness broke,
She got one glimpse of quiet and the cool blue,
To show her for a moment such things were,"

--the prayer was granted her.

So, musing on the murder of the Countess Franceschini by her husband;
and her four days' survival of her wounds, does one half of Rome express
itself--"The Other Half" in contrast to the earliest commentator on the
crime: "Half-Rome." This Other-Half is wholly sympathetic to the
seventeen-yeared child who lies in the hospital-ward at St. Anna's. "Why
was she made to learn what Guido Franceschini's heart could hold?"
demands the imagined spokesman; and, summing up, he exclaims:

"Who did it shall account to Christ--
Having no pity on the harml