“And how is it with you?” asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for she never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me.  “You, I think, cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling.”

“I have always been in earnest,” answered Hollingsworth.  “I have hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart!  It matters little what my outward toil may be.  Were I a slave, at the bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in its ultimate accomplishment, that I do now.  Miles Coverdale is not in earnest, either as a poet or a laborer.”

“You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth,” said I, a little hurt.  “I have kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had been in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!”

“I cannot conceive,” observed Zenobia with great emphasis,—­and, no doubt, she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,—­“I cannot conceive of being so continually as Mr. Coverdale is within the sphere of a strong and noble nature, without being strengthened and ennobled by its influence!”

This amiable remark of the fair Zenobia confirmed me in what I had already begun to suspect, that Hollingsworth, like many other illustrious prophets, reformers, and philanthropists, was likely to make at least two proselytes among the women to one among the men.  Zenobia and Priscilla!  These, I believe (unless my unworthy self might be reckoned for a third), were the only disciples of his mission; and I spent a great deal of time, uselessly, in trying to conjecture what Hollingsworth meant to do with them—­and they with him!

IX.  HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA

It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women.  If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance.  Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him very clumsily together again.  What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,—­though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage,—­may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.

Thus, as my conscience has often whispered me, I did Hollingsworth a great wrong by prying into his character; and am perhaps doing him as great a one, at this moment, by putting faith in the discoveries which I seemed to make.  But I could not help it.  Had I loved him less, I might have used him better.  He and Zenobia and Priscilla—­both for their own sakes and as connected with him—­were separated from the rest of the Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of a problem which