n heart; remember what blood runs in these female veins!
Man! Father! Vitiator! My spirit is not female! my blood, my passions, my
contempt of peril, my will indomitable and immutable, are, like my mortal
body, your begetting! My crimes, and my corruption, are your teaching!
Beware then, as you know the heat of your own appetites, how you presume
to hinder mine! Beware, as you know your own recklessness in doing and
contempt in suffering, how you stir me, your child, to do and suffer
likewise! Beware, as you know the extent of your own crimes, the depth of
your own pollution, how you drive me, your pupil, to out-do her master!
Beware! I say! beware! This man is mine. Harm but one hair upon his head,
and you shall die, like a dog, with the dogs who snarl at your bidding,
and your name perish with you. I have spoken!"

There needed not one tenth part of the wisdom, which the arch-traitor
really possessed, to shew him how much he had miscalculated the range of
his daughter's intellect; the fierce energies of her powerful but
misdirected mind.

He felt, for a moment, as the daring archimage whose spells, too potent
for their master's safety, have evoked and unchained a spirit that defies
their guidance. But, like that archimage, conscious that all depends on
the exertion of his wonted empire, he struggled hard to regain his lost
authority.

"Girl," he replied, in those firm deep tones of grave authority, which he
deemed the best calculated to control her excitement, "You are mad! Mad,
and ungrateful; and like a frantic dog would turn and rend the hand that
feeds you, for a shadow. I never thought of making you an instrument; fool
indeed had I been, to think I could hoodwink such an intellect as yours!
If I have striven to clear away the mists of prejudice from before your
eyes, which, in your senseless anger, you now call corrupting you, it was
because I saw in you a kindred spirit to mine own, capable to soar
fearless and undazzled into the very noon of reason. If I have taught you
to indulge your passions, opened a universe of pleasures to your ken, it
was that I saw in you a woman of mind so manly, that all the weaknesses,
which fools call affections, would be but powerless to warp it from its
purpose. I would have made you"--

"The world's scorn!" she interrupted him, bitterly; but he went on,
without noticing the interruption--

"The equal of myself in intellect, in energy, and wisdom; else how had you
dared to br