hat the reproof was over, and she quietly quitted
the room.

The man pushed the door to violently with his foot, and said in an accent
of angry scorn, "That is what is now called a wife."

Well, we have reached the mystery: we have found that it was a crime.

In the working of social laws there occur countless cases of individual
hardship. The institution of marriage is as beneficent as the element of
fire; yet, like that, it sometimes tortures when it should only have
comforted.

The sufferer, if a woman, usually bears her smart tamely--with more or
less domestic fretting and private weeping indeed, but without violent
effort to escape from her bed of embers. Divorce is public, ugly and
brutal: her sensibility revolts from it. Moreover, mere unhappiness, mere
disappointment of the affections, does not establish a claim for legal
separation. Finally, there is woman's difficulty of self-maintenance--the
fact that her labor will not in general give her both comfort and
position.

What then? Unloved, unable to love, yet with an intense desire for
affection, and an immense capacity for granting it, her heart is tempted
to wander beyond the circle of her duty. A flattering shape approaches her
dungeon-walls; a voice calls to her to come forth and be glad, if only for
a moment; there seems to be a chance of winning the adoration which has
been her whole life's desire; there is an opportunity of using the
emotions which are burning within her. Shall she burst open the gate on
which is written LEGALITY?

Evidently the temptation is mighty. Laden with a forsaken, wounded and
perhaps angry heart, she is so easily led into the belief that her
exceptional suffering gives her a right to exceptional action! She feels
herself justified in setting aside law, when law, falsifying its purpose,
violating its solemn pledge, brings her misery instead of happiness. She
will not, or cannot, reflect that special hardships must occur under all
law; that it is the duty of the individual to bear such chance griefs
without insurrection against the public conscience; that entire freedom of
private judgment would dissolve society.

Too often--though far less often than man does the like--she makes of her
sorrow an armor of excuse, and enters into a contest for unwarrantable
chances of felicity. Only, in general, she is so far conscious of guilt,
or at least so far fearful of punishment, as to carry on her struggle in
the darkness. Few, howev