impossibilities in his catalogue are lessened so far as to allow hope; as for Handella, there is reason to believe in her advent,—­many women have written faultless tunes,—­all that is wanted is mathematical harmony,—­and Mary Somerville, Maria Mitchell, and the sister of the Herschels forbid despair on that point; and God forbid the Victoria Huga! the male of the species is more than enough.  We must look upon any wide departure from the prevailing pattern either as a monstrosity or as a development of the great plan; therefore, if one of these women is a monstrosity, Laplace and Aristotle are to be considered equally so.  And then, also, Mr. Reade, masculine as he is, finds eclipse in the shade of either Mrs. Lewes, (Marion Evans,) or Charlotte Bronte, or Madame Dudevant.  As for men, they are themselves just emerging from barbarism; a race rises only with its women, as all history shows.  The whole sex has produced no operas? they are modern things; when men have advanced a little, when our audience is ready, we shall write operas.  Epics? how many has the entire opposite sex produced? well, four:  terrible disparity, when we count by billions!  These are not in Nature?  Whose assertion for that? till he can prove it, the word of “some American ladies” is as good as the word of Mr. Charles Reade.  For myself, continued the outraged Una, I know a beautiful woman who left lovers, society, pleasures,—­absorbed in her moulding and modelling, day by day and year by year, with no positive result except in her own convictions and consciousness,—­who spent the long summer hours alone in the little building with her white ideas, and who, winter night after night, rose to cross street and garden and snowy fields to tend the fire and wet the clay, and who, on more than one morning finding the weary labor of months wasted where the frozen substance had peeled from the framework and lay in fragments on the floor, without a murmur began the patient work again.  That was during the trial; afterwards attainment.  Was there no long strain and steady struggle there?

Una’s enthusiasm infects us; and very apropos to all this do we hear Mr. Reade’s Jacintha remark,—­

    “We are good creatures, but we don’t trouble our heads with
    justice; it is a word you shall never hear a woman use, unless she
    happens to be doing some monstrous injustice at the very moment.”

And with the best-natured contempt in the world, Dr. Sampson exclaims,—­

    “What! go t’ a wumman for the truth, when I can go t’ infallible
    inference?”

Even Lucy Fountain saw many young ladies healed of many young enthusiasms by a wedding-ring,—­but a wittier woman has said it better, Una declares, in asserting that a married woman’s name is her epitaph.  If, however, Mr. Reade’s opinion of womankind is at any time justifiable, we must bring Una to witness that it is so in the following instance:—­