piness of women. The unhappiness of women! The voice of their
silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of tears that they
had shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through her own eyes.
Ages of oppression had rolled over them; uncounted millions had lived
only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were her sisters, they were
her own, and the day of their delivery had dawned. This was the only
sacred cause; this was the great, the just revolution. It must triumph,
it must sweep everything before it; it must exact from the other, the
brutal, blood-stained, ravening race, the last particle of expiation! It
would be the greatest change the world had seen; it would be a new era
for the human family, and the names of those who had helped to show the
way and lead the squadrons would be the brightest in the tables of fame.
They would be names of women weak, insulted, persecuted, but devoted in
every pulse of their being to the cause, and asking no better fate than
to die for it. It was not clear to this interesting girl in what manner
such a sacrifice (as this last) would be required of her, but she saw
the matter through a kind of sunrise-mist of emotion which made danger
as rosy as success. When Miss Birdseye approached, it transfigured her
familiar, her comical shape, and made the poor little humanitary hack
seem already a martyr. Olive Chancellor looked at her with love,
remembered that she had never, in her long, unrewarded, weary life, had
a thought or an impulse for herself. She had been consumed by the
passion of sympathy; it had crumpled her into as many creases as an old
glazed, distended glove. She had been laughed at, but she never knew it;
she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the
world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the
grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque,
undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women
were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! While
Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder if she wouldn't say
something, Olive Chancellor tenderly fastened a small battered brooch
which confined her collar and which had half detached itself.

VI

"Oh, thank you," said Miss Birdseye, "I shouldn't like to lose it; it
was given me by Mirandola!" He had been one of her refugees in the old
time, when two or three of her friends, acquainted with the limits of
his