ul and practical, never to be cowed by fortune, never
to be cajoled by craft; neither more unselfish in her ends nor more
unscrupulous in her practice than might have been expected from her
training and her creed.

But at the crowning moment of trial there are those who assert their
belief that the woman who on her way to the field of Corrichie had
uttered her wish to be a man, that she might know all the hardship and
all the enjoyment of a soldier's life, riding forth "in jack and
knapskull"--the woman who long afterward was to hold her own for two
days together, without help of counsel, against all the array of English
law and English statesmanship, armed with irrefragable evidence and
supported by the resentment of a nation--showed herself devoid of moral
and physical resolution; too senseless to realize the significance and
too heartless to face the danger of a situation from which the simplest
exercise of reason, principle, or courage must have rescued the most
unsuspicious and inexperienced of honest women who was not helplessly
deficient in self-reliance and self-respect.

The famous correspondence produced next year in evidence against her at
the conference of York may have been, as her partisans affirm, so
craftily garbled and falsified by interpolation, suppression,
perversion, or absolute forgery as to be all but historically worthless.
Its acceptance or its rejection does not in any degree whatever affect,
for better or for worse, the rational estimate of her character. The
problem presented by the simple existence of the facts just summed up
remains in either case absolutely the same.

That the coarse and imperious nature of the hardy and able ruffian who
had now become openly her master should no less openly have shown itself
even in the first moments of their inauspicious union is what any
bystander of common insight must inevitably have foreseen. Tears,
dejection, and passionate expressions of a despair "wishing only for
death," bore fitful and variable witness to her first sense of a heavier
yoke than yet had galled her spirit and her pride. At other times her
affectionate gayety would give evidence as trustworthy of a fearless and
improvident satisfaction. They rode out in state together, and if he
kept cap in hand as a subject she would snatch it from him and clap it
on his head again; while in graver things she took all due or possible
care to gratify his ambition by the insertion of a clause in th