all that time.  She had life’s summer all before her, and a hundred varieties of brilliant success.  What an actress Zenobia might have been!  It was one of her least valuable capabilities.  How forcibly she might have wrought upon the world, either directly in her own person, or by her influence upon some man, or a series of men, of controlling genius!  Every prize that could be worth a woman’s having—­and many prizes which other women are too timid to desire—­lay within Zenobia’s reach.”

“In all this,” I observed, “there would have been nothing to satisfy her heart.”

“Her heart!” answered Westervelt contemptuously.  “That troublesome organ (as she had hitherto found it) would have been kept in its due place and degree, and have had all the gratification it could fairly claim.  She would soon have established a control over it.  Love had failed her, you say.  Had it never failed her before?  Yet she survived it, and loved again,—­possibly not once alone, nor twice either.  And now to drown herself for yonder dreamy philanthropist!”

“Who are you,” I exclaimed indignantly, “that dare to speak thus of the dead?  You seem to intend a eulogy, yet leave out whatever was noblest in her, and blacken while you mean to praise.  I have long considered you as Zenobia’s evil fate.  Your sentiments confirm me in the idea, but leave me still ignorant as to the mode in which you have influenced her life.  The connection may have been indissoluble, except by death.  Then, indeed,—­always in the hope of God’s infinite mercy,—­I cannot deem it a misfortune that she sleeps in yonder grave!”

“No matter what I was to her,” he answered gloomily, yet without actual emotion.  “She is now beyond my reach.  Had she lived, and hearkened to my counsels, we might have served each other well.  But there Zenobia lies in yonder pit, with the dull earth over her.  Twenty years of a brilliant lifetime thrown away for a mere woman’s whim!”

Heaven deal with Westervelt according to his nature and deserts!—­ that is to say, annihilate him.  He was altogether earthy, worldly, made for time and its gross objects, and incapable—­except by a sort of dim reflection caught from other minds—­of so much as one spiritual idea.  Whatever stain Zenobia had was caught from him; nor does it seldom happen that a character of admirable qualities loses its better life because the atmosphere that should sustain it is rendered poisonous by such breath as this man mingled with Zenobia’s.  Yet his reflections possessed their share of truth.  It was a woeful thought, that a woman of Zenobia’s diversified capacity should have fancied herself irretrievably defeated on the broad battlefield of life, and with no refuge, save to fall on her own sword, merely because Love had gone against her.  It is nonsense, and a miserable wrong,—­the result, like so many others, of masculine egotism,—­that the success or failure of woman’s existence should be made to depend wholly on the affections, and on one species of affection, while man has such a multitude of other chances, that this seems but an incident.  For its own sake, if it will do no more, the world should throw open all its avenues to the passport of a woman’s bleeding heart.