th saints and sinners; the saints
by the depth and beauty of her spiritual experience, the sinners by her
freedom from every shade of cant and by her strong, almost masculine,
sympathy with the difficulties of our human nature. Catherine the Great,
in her colloquies with the nervous and hesitating Diderot, used to say,
"Proceed; _between men_ all is allowable." One may affirm of Miss Royden
that she is at once a true woman and a great man.

It is this perfect balance of the masculine and feminine in her
personality which makes her so effective a public speaker, so powerful
an influence in private discourse, and so safe a writer on questions of
extreme delicacy, such as the problem of sex. She is always on the
level of the whole body of humanity, a complete person, a veritable
human being, neither a member of a class nor the representative of a
sex.

Perhaps it may be permitted to mention two events in her life which help
one to understand how it is she has come to play this masculine and
feminine part in public life.

One day, a day of torrential rain, when she was a girl living in her
father's house in Cheshire, she and her sister saw a carriage and pair
coming through the park towards the house. The coachman and footman on
the box were soaking wet, and kept their heads down to avoid the sting
of the rain in their eyes. The horses were streaming with rain and the
carriage might have been a watercart.

When the caller, a rich lady, arrived in the drawing-room, polite wonder
was expressed at her boldness in coming out on such a dreadful day. She
seemed surprised. "Oh, but I came in a closed carriage," she explained.

This innocent remark opened the eyes of Miss Royden to the obliquity of
vision which is wrought, all unconsciously in many cases, by the power
of selfishness. The condition of her coachman and footman had never for
a moment presented itself to the lady's mind. Miss Royden made
acquaintance with righteous indignation. She became a reformer, and
something of a vehement reformer.

The drenched carriage coming through a splash of rain to her home will
remain for ever in her mind as an image of that spirit of selfishness
which in its manifold and subtle workings wrecks the beauty of human
existence.

Miss Royden, it should be said, had been prepared by a long experience
of pain to feel sympathy with the sufferings of other people. Her mind
had been lamentably ploughed up ever since the dawn of memory to r