think I thought so much about the suffering of men--the fathers,
the brothers, the sons--bereft; but the women--the helpless,
outnumbering, unconsulted women; they whom war trampled down, without
a choice or protest; the patient, limited, domestic women, who thought
little, but loved much, and, loving, had lost all--to them I would
have spoken.

For it came to seem to me, as I pondered these things in my own heart,
that even the best and kindest forms of our prevailing beliefs had
nothing to say to an afflicted woman that could help her much. Creeds
and commentaries and sermons were made by men. What tenderest of men
knows how to comfort his own daughter when her heart is broken? What
can the doctrines do for the desolated by death? They were chains of
rusty iron, eating into raw hearts. The prayer of the preacher were
not much better; it sounded like the language of an unknown race to
a despairing girl. Listen to the hymn. It falls like icicles on snow.
Or, if it happen to be one of the old genuine outcries of the Church,
sprung from real human anguish or hope, it maddens the listener, and
she flees from it, too sore a thing to bear the touch of holy music.

At this time, be it said, I had no interest at all in any especial
movement for the peculiar needs of women as a class. I was reared in
circles which did not concern themselves with what we should probably
have called agitators. I was taught the old ideas of womanhood, in the
old way, and had not to any important extent begun to resent them.

Perhaps I am wrong here. Individually, I may have begun to recoil from
them, but only in a purely selfish, personal way, beyond which I had
evolved neither theory nor conscience; much less the smallest tendency
towards sympathy with any public movement of the question.

In the course of two or three years spent in exceptional solitude,
I had read a good deal in the direction of my ruling thoughts and
feeling, and came to the writing of my little book, not ignorant of
what had been written for and by the mourning. The results of this
reading, of course, went into the book, and seemed to me, at the time,
by far the most useful part of it.

How the book grew, who can say? More of nature than of purpose,
surely. It moved like a tear or a sigh or a prayer. In a sense I
scarcely knew that I wrote it. Yet it signified labor and time, crude
and young as it looks to me now; and often as I have wondered, from
my soul, why it has kn