ia
liked to see him approach with his eyes blazing. There are not many
women like her; she is a rare type--but not, therefore, to be passed
over in silence. It is little consolation that the man-eating tiger is
a rare animal, if one of them be actually on the path; and to the
philosopher a possibility is a fact. But the true value of the study of
abnormal development is that, in the deepest sense, such development is
not abnormal at all, but the perfected result of the laws that avenge
law-breach. It is in and through such that we get glimpses, down the
gulf of a moral volcano, to the infernal possibilities of the
human--the lawless rot of that which, in its _attainable_ idea, is
nothing less than divine, imagined, foreseen, cherished, and labored
for, by the Father of the human. Such inverted possibility, the
infernal possibility, I mean, lies latent in every one of us, and,
except we stir ourselves up to the right, will gradually, from a
possibility, become an energy. The wise man dares not yield to a
temptation, were it only for the terror that, if he do, he will yield
the more readily again. The commonplace critic, who recognizes life
solely upon his own conscious level, mocks equally at the ideal and its
antipode, incapable of recognizing the art of Shakespeare himself as
true to the human nature that will not be human.

I have said that Letty did her best with what money Tom gave her; but
when she came to find that he had not paid the lodging for two months;
that the payment of various things he had told her to order and he
would see to had been neglected, and that the tradespeople were getting
persistent in their applications; that, when she told him anything of
the sort, he treated it at one time as a matter of no consequence which
he would speedily set right, at another as behavior of the creditor
hugely impertinent, which he would punish by making him wait his
time--her heart at length sank within her, and she felt there was no
bulwark between her and a sea of troubles; she felt as if she lay
already in the depths of a debtor's jail. Therefore, sparing as she had
been from the first, she was more sparing than ever. Not only would she
buy nothing for which she could not pay down, having often in
consequence to go without proper food, but, even when she had a little
in hand, would live like an anchorite. She grew very thin; and,
in-deed, if she had not been of the healthiest, could not have stood
her own treatm