moment only one thing in the world seemed to be of much real
importance--that the man now sitting by her side should not be taken
away from her. To know that he existed, though far from her, would be
almost enough--a sort of beacon-light--a light she might never reach to,
but which would guide her . . . whither?

In no century have men been loved so implicitly by women as in the
nineteenth; nor could this be otherwise, for putting aside the fact that
the natural wants of love have become a nervous erethism in the struggle
that a surplus population of more than two million women has created,
there are psychological reasons that to-day more than ever impel women to
shrink from the intellectual monotony of their sex, and to view with
increasing admiration the male mind; for as the gates of the harem are
being broken down, and the gloom of the female mind clears, it becomes
certain that woman brings a loftier reverence to the shrine of man than
she has done in any past age, seeing, as she now does, in him the
incarnation of the freedom of which she is vaguely conscious and which
she is perceptibly acquiring. So sets the main current that is bearing
civilization along; but beneath the great feminine tide there is an
undercurrent of hatred and revolt. This is particularly observable in
the leaders of the movement; women who in the tumult of their
aspirations, and their passionate yearnings towards the new ideal, and
the memory of the abasement their sex have been in the past, and are
still being in the present, subjected to, forget the laws of life, and
with virulent virtue and protest condemn love--that is to say, love in
the sense of sexual intercourse--and proclaim a higher mission for woman
than to be the mother of men: and an adjuvant, unless corrected by
sanative qualities of a high order, is, of course, found in any physical
defect. But as the corporeal and incorporeal hereditaments of Alice
Barton and Lady Cecilia Cullen were examined fully in the beginning of
this chapter, it is only necessary to here indicate the order of
ideas--the moral atmosphere of the time--to understand the efflorescence
of the two minds, and to realize how curiously representative they are
of this last quarter of the nineteenth century.

And it was necessary to make that survey of psychical cause and effect
to appreciate the sentiments that actuated Alice in her relationship
with Harding. She loved him, but more through the imagination than