“It shall not always be so!” cried she.  “If I live another year, I will lift up my own voice in behalf of woman’s wider liberty!”

She perhaps saw me smile.

“What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles Coverdale?” exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash of anger in her eyes.  “That smile, permit me to say, makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling and shallow thought.  It is my belief—­yes, and my prophecy, should I die before it happens—­that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man.  Thus far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and her whole mind.  The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats!  We mumble a few weak words, and leave a thousand better ones unsaid.  You let us write a little, it is true, on a limited range of subjects.  But the pen is not for woman.  Her power is too natural and immediate.  It is with the living voice alone that she can compel the world to recognize the light of her intellect and the depth of her heart!”

Now,—­though I could not well say so to Zenobia,—­I had not smiled from any unworthy estimate of woman, or in denial of the claims which she is beginning to put forth.  What amused and puzzled me was the fact, that women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease.  They are not natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional misfortune.  I could measure Zenobia’s inward trouble by the animosity with which she now took up the general quarrel of woman against man.

“I will give you leave, Zenobia,” replied I, “to fling your utmost scorn upon me, if you ever hear me utter a sentiment unfavorable to the widest liberty which woman has yet dreamed of.  I would give her all she asks, and add a great deal more, which she will not be the party to demand, but which men, if they were generous and wise, would grant of their own free motion.  For instance, I should love dearly—­for the next thousand years, at least—­to have all government devolve into the hands of women.  I hate to be ruled by my own sex; it excites my jealousy, and wounds my pride.  It is the iron sway of bodily force which abases us, in our compelled submission.  But how sweet the free, generous courtesy with which I would kneel before a woman-ruler!”

“Yes, if she were young and beautiful,” said Zenobia, laughing.  “But how if she were sixty, and a fright?”