retched forward----

Philip, my boy, do you know I am the sort of man that locks his door
sometimes and cries his heart out of his eyes,--that can sob like a
woman and not be ashamed of it? I come of fighting-blood on my mother's
side, you know; I think I could be savage on occasion. But I am
tender,--more and more tender as I come into my fulness of manhood. I
don't like to strike a man, (laugh, if you like,--I know I hit hard
when I do strike,)--but what I can't stand is the sight of these poor,
patient, toiling women, that never find out in this life how good they
are, and never know what it is to be told they are angels while they
still wear the pleasing incumbrances of humanity. I don't know what to
make of these cases. To think that a woman is never to be a woman again,
whatever she may come to as an unsexed angel,--and that she should die
unloved! Why does not somebody come and carry off this noble woman,
waiting here all ready to make a man happy? Philip, do you know the
pathos there is in the eyes of unsought women, oppressed with the burden
of an inner life unshared? I can see into them now as I could not in
those earlier days. I sometimes think their pupils dilate on purpose to
let my consciousness glide through them; indeed, I dread them, I come so
close to the nerve of the soul itself in these momentary intimacies. You
used to tell me I was a Turk,--that my heart was full of pigeon-holes,
with accommodations inside for a whole flock of doves. I don't know but
I am still as Youngish as ever in my ways,--Brigham-Youngish, I mean;
at any rate, I always want to give a little love to all the poor things
that cannot have a whole man to themselves. If they would only be
contented with a little!

Here now are two girls in this school where I am teaching. One of them,
Rosa M., is not more than sixteen years old, I think they say; but
Nature has forced her into a tropical luxuriance of beauty, as if it
were July with her, instead of May. I suppose it is all natural enough
that this girl should like a young man's attention, even if he were a
grave schoolmaster; but the eloquence of this young thing's look
is unmistakable,--and yet she does not know the language it is
talking,--they none of them do; and there is where a good many poor
creatures of our good-for-nothing sex are mistaken. There is no danger
of my being rash, but I think this girl will cost somebody his life yet.
She is one of those women men make a quarr