of hearing, where
women under scourge of the laws they have not helped decree may and do
deliver their minds. She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature
against the Institutions of Man: a woman little adapted for the post of
revel; but to this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come; she who
was designed by nature to be an ornament of those Institutions opposed
them and when thinking of the rights and the conduct of the decrepit
Legitimate--virulent in a heathen vindictiveness declaring itself
holy--she had Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence. It was
eloquent with her, to the deafening of other voices in herself, even to
the convincing of herself, when she was wrought by the fires within to
feel elementally. The other voices within her issued of the acknowledged
dues to her family and to the world--the civilization protecting women:
sentences thereanent in modern books and Journals. But the remembrance
of moods of fiery exaltation, when the Nature she called by name of Love
raised the chorus within to stop all outer buzzing, was, in a perpetual
struggle with a whirlpool, a constant support while she and Victor
were one at heart. The sense of her standing alone made her sway; and
a thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions of the
abyss.

Luxuriously she applied to his public life for witness that he had
governed wisely as well as affectionately so long; and he might
therefore, with the chorussing of the world of public men, expect a
woman blindfold to follow his lead. But no; we may be rebels against
our time and its Laws: if we are really for Nature, we are not lawless.
Nataly's untutored scruples, which came side by side with her ability to
plead for her acts, restrained her from complicity in the ensnaring of
a young man of social rank to espouse the daughter of a couple socially
insurgent-stained, to common thinking, should denunciation come. The
Nature upholding her fled at a vision of a stranger entangled. Pitiable
to reflect, that he was not one of the adventurer-lords of prey who hunt
and run down shadowed heiresses and are congratulated on their luck in
a tolerating country! How was the young man to be warned? How, under the
happiest of suppositions, propitiate his family! And such a family, if
consenting with knowledge, would consent only for the love of money. It
was angling with as vile a bait as the rascal lord's. Humiliation hung
on the scheme; it struck to scorc