ss
of character; he contented himself with believing that she was as
innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a vocalist of
exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music. How prettily, indeed,
she made some of it sound!

"Of course I only speak to women--to my own dear sisters; I don't speak
to men, for I don't expect them to like what I say. They pretend to
admire us very much, but I should like them to admire us a little less
and to trust us a little more. I don't know what we have ever done to
them that they should keep us out of everything. We have trusted _them_
too much, and I think the time has come now for us to judge them, and
say that by keeping us out we don't think they have done so well. When I
look around me at the world, and at the state that men have brought it
to, I confess I say to myself, "Well, if women had fixed it this way I
should like to know what they would think of it!" When I see the
dreadful misery of mankind and think of the suffering of which at any
hour, at any moment, the world is full, I say that if this is the best
they can do by themselves, they had better let us come in a little and
see what _we_ can do. We couldn't possibly make it worse, could we? If
we had done only this, we shouldn't boast of it. Poverty, and ignorance,
and crime; disease, and wickedness, and wars! Wars, always more wars,
and always more and more. Blood, blood--the world is drenched with
blood! To kill each other, with all sorts of expensive and perfected
instruments, that is the most brilliant thing they have been able to
invent. It seems to me that we might stop it, we might invent something
better. The cruelty--the cruelty; there is so much, so much! Why
shouldn't tenderness come in? Why should our woman's hearts be so full
of it, and all so wasted and withered, while armies and prisons and
helpless miseries grow greater all the while? I am only a girl, a simple
American girl, and of course I haven't seen much, and there is a great
deal of life that I don't know anything about. But there are some things
I feel--it seems to me as if I had been born to feel them; they are in
my ears in the stillness of the night and before my face in the visions
of the darkness. It is what the great sisterhood of women might do if
they should all join hands, and lift up their voices above the brutal
uproar of the world, in which it is so hard for the plea of mercy or of
justice, the moan of weakness and suffering, t