“Ah! it is you that rate womanhood low,” said I.  “But let me go on.  I have never found it possible to suffer a bearded priest so near my heart and conscience as to do me any spiritual good.  I blush at the very thought!  Oh, in the better order of things, Heaven grant that the ministry of souls may be left in charge of women!  The gates of the Blessed City will be thronged with the multitude that enter in, when that day comes!  The task belongs to woman.  God meant it for her.  He has endowed her with the religious sentiment in its utmost depth and purity, refined from that gross, intellectual alloy with which every masculine theologist—­save only One, who merely veiled himself in mortal and masculine shape, but was, in truth, divine—­has been prone to mingle it.  I have always envied the Catholics their faith in that sweet, sacred Virgin Mother, who stands between them and the Deity, intercepting somewhat of his awful splendor, but permitting his love to stream upon the worshipper more intelligibly to human comprehension through the medium of a woman’s tenderness.  Have I not said enough, Zenobia?”

“I cannot think that this is true,” observed Priscilla, who had been gazing at me with great, disapproving eyes.  “And I am sure I do not wish it to be true!”

“Poor child!” exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously.  “She is the type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it.  He is never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what he loves.  In denying us our rights, he betrays even more blindness to his own interests than profligate disregard of ours!”

“Is this true?” asked Priscilla with simplicity, turning to Hollingsworth.  “Is it all true, that Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have been saying?”

“No, Priscilla!” answered Hollingsworth with his customary bluntness.  “They have neither of them spoken one true word yet.”

“Do you despise woman?” said Zenobia.

“Ah, Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!”

“Despise her?  No!” cried Hollingsworth, lifting his great shaggy head and shaking it at us, while his eyes glowed almost fiercely.  “She is the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character.  Her place is at man’s side.  Her office, that of the sympathizer; the unreserved, unquestioning believer; the recognition, withheld in every other manner, but given, in pity, through woman’s heart, lest man should utterly lose faith in himself; the echo of God’s own voice, pronouncing, ‘It is well done!’ All the separate action of woman is, and ever has been, and always shall be, false, foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs!  Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster—­and, thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster—­without man as her acknowledged principal!  As true as I had once a mother whom