capacity for
winning men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of
his energies: men and, individually, women. Individually, the women were
to be counted on as well; warm supporters.

It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them
collectively. Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them. Glancing at
congregated women, he had a chill. The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly
judicial assembly: that is, the phantom of the offended collective
woman: that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of
civilized life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the
tolerable, the legal, and banish the rebellious: these maintained an
aspect of the stand against him.

Did Nataly read the case: namely, that the crowned collective woman is
not to be subdued? And what are we to say of the indefinite but forcible
Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
Nataly!

Victor's novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight. Not
many of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that
index: nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure
of value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides.
The passing by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to
sit beneath her green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a
henbane-visage!--had precipitated him into his first real grasp of the
abstract verity: and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world
to the practical mind. But he made no advance. He stopped in a fever of
sensibility, to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a
source that was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.

In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school
of its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums
done on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip
of the creditor on the defaulter. Debtors are always paying like those
who are guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth,
they have made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in
soul; and the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete
burden is undischarged. You know the Liar; you must have seen him
diminishing, until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to
humanity's preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads