All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according to the full measure of their capacity.  Zenobia brought me my gruel every day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth must be told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit by my bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several gratuitous throbs to my pulse.  Her poor little stories and tracts never half did justice to her intellect.  It was only the lack of a fitter avenue that drove her to seek development in literature.  She was made (among a thousand other things that she might have been) for a stump oratress.  I recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her mind was full of weeds.  It startled me sometimes, in my state of moral as well as bodily faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy.  She made no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering them as with a breeze from her fan.  A female reformer, in her attacks upon society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is inclined to aim directly at that spot.  Especially the relation between the sexes is naturally among the earliest to attract her notice.

Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman.  The homely simplicity of her dress could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her presence.  The image of her form and face should have been multiplied all over the earth.  It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her as the spectacle of only a few.  The stage would have been her proper sphere.  She should have made it a point of duty, moreover, to sit endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferably to the latter; because the cold decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with her material perfection in its entireness.  I know not well how to express that the native glow of coloring in her cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms, and what was visible of her full bust,—­in a word, her womanliness incarnated,—­ compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not quite the privilege of modesty to gaze at her.  Illness and exhaustion, no doubt, had made me morbidly sensitive.

I noticed—­and wondered how Zenobia contrived it—­that she had always a new flower in her hair.  And still it was a hot-house flower,—­an outlandish flower,—­a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be fervid and spicy.  Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to the preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich beauty of the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn; so fit, indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem, in a happy exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning Zenobia’s head.  It might be that my feverish fantasies clustered themselves about this peculiarity, and caused it to look more gorgeous and wonderful than if beheld with temperate eyes.  In the height of my illness, as I well recollect, I went so far as to pronounce it preternatural.