s direction.

After going through all sorts of examinations, at which she flung
herself determinedly, and which she kept on passing with the greatest
credit, after meeting with innumerable disappointments and delays, after
being politely told by one judge after another that she was a woman, and
therefore could not be a man,--hence, _a fortiori_, she could not be a
lawyer,--after six years, I say, Mrs. Tarbell succeeded. Her name went
on the list of attorneys. The court-clerk gave her a certificate, and
received two dollars and sixty cents. The newspapers chronicled the
circumstance. Her friends were triumphant. Judge Measy, who admitted her
to the bar, was compared to Lord Mansfield and to Mr. Lincoln.

But marriage is not the only lofty undertaking attended by petty
miseries. Mrs. Tarbell could bear her great misfortunes with courage and
resolution: as she had great hopes, so she expected great disasters. Not
Lars Porsenna of Clusium himself was more clapped on the back, and
huzzahed after, and backed up by the augurs, nor more frequently told
that he was the beloved of heaven, than Mrs. Tarbell had been by her
soothsayers and partisans. At first this was all very well, but
afterward it grew tiresome. If Mrs. Tarbell, emerging from widowhood and
placing herself in the van of feminine progress, was really a pioneer in
a heaven sent mission (as perhaps she was), there was no need to repeat
the phrase so often. When two or three years had gone by, and it began
to be apparent that Mrs. Tarbell had a long and up-hill struggle before
her, she became very impatient of enthusiasm. She had never liked it,
even when the female welkin (if there be such a thing) had first rung
with applause for her, and now it was painfully uncomfortable. Mrs.
Lucretia Pegley (authoress of "Woman's Wrongs," "The Weaker Sex?" "Eve
_v._ Adam," etc., etc., editor of "Woman's Sphere," and chief
contributor to the "Coming Era;" her friends called her a Boadicea, and
denied that she had withdrawn from the study of medicine because she had
fainted at her first operation),--Mrs. Pegley observed her friend's
shortness of temper, and took her to task about it. "Ellen Tarbell," she
said, "you surprise me very much. Do you wish to give the impression
that your motives are purely personal and--forgive me, but the word is
necessary--selfish? that you have no interest in the movement in which
you are a pioneer? that your heart is not with the cause which after s