of endurance, and are tried according to
our gifts. Else why are the powers and the gifts given to us by a
Providence which never wasteth, nor doeth in freakish negligence. The
yoke of love is not weighty enough to bow sufficiently the curving neck.
With a love which cannot be satisfied comes the mighty temptation to sin
and disgrace. Even into this black chasm our beauties look with steady
eye, and meditate the step. It is a part of their self-sustaining nature
and towering spirit to wreak their own will. Once let them give their
love to man, and it is the passion of their lives. Of gossip and the
wagging tongue of scandal, and of that vague, shadowy phantom,
reputation, they reck not. These unsubstantial fleeting barriers are
dissipated in an instant before the mighty breath of their omnipotent
passion. Their love is the great fact of their lives. Why should it
yield to less powerful sentiments, to inferior satisfactions. If the
laws and sentiments of the commonalty of mankind oppose, why gain the
lesser, palling pleasure of a fair character among our fellows whom we
care not for, and lose the one joy of existence? Such, in all three of
these novels, to a greater or less extent, is the theory of action of
the female characters.

They are however rescued from the last degree of actual crime in each
case by the good taste of the author, feeling that such chapters had
better not be written voluntarily in fiction, or perchance by his love
for his proud maidens, whom he cannot taint with degradation in act,
even if the sin upon their souls be wellnigh as black in the eyes of a
strict judge, arbiter alike of the seen and the unseen. Such are hardly
the conceptions wherewith the brain of a cultivated woman would teem. It
were too glaring treason to her sex and to her own nature. Although it
must be said that there is no word of coarseness or bold suggestion of
wickedness to be found upon any page. So far from it, we scarcely find
recognized the crime to which the maidens are tempted, and we
half-ignorantly wonder at the existence of compunctions, excited at we
can scarcely say what. But the author knew probably well enough, and if
she were one of the sisterhood of women, then must she be isolated and
at enmity with them all. Her hand is against every woman's and every
woman's hand against her.

Perhaps there is a fault in the tone of these novels. This may have been
inferred by some strict moralists from the preceding para