There came in her a sudden outbreak of passionate indignation at the unequal hardships of a woman’s lot.  Often as she had read and heard and talked of this, she seemed to understand it for the first time; now first was it real to her, in the sense of an ill that goads and tortures.  Not society alone was chargeable with the injustice; nature herself had dealt cruelly with woman.  Constituted as she is, limited as she is by inexorable laws, by what refinement of malice is she endowed with energies and desires like to those of men?  She should have been made a creature of sluggish brain, of torpid pulse; then she might have discharged her natural duties without exposure to fever and pain and remorse such as man never knows.

She asked no liberty to be vile, as her husband made himself; but that she was denied an equal freedom to exercise all her powers, to enrich her life with experiences of joy, this fired her to revolt.  A woman who belongs to the old education readily believes that it is not to experiences of joy, but of sorrow, that she must look for her true blessedness; her ideal is one of renunciation; religious motive is in her enforced by what she deems the obligation of her sex.  But Cecily was of the new world, the emancipated order.  For a time she might accept misery as her inalienable lot, but her youthful years, fed with the new philosophy, must in the end rebel

Could she live with such a man without sooner or later taking a taint of his ignobleness?  His path was downwards, and how could she hope to keep her own course in independence of him?  It shamed her that she had ever loved him.  But indeed she had not loved the Reuben that now was; the better part of him was then predominant.  No matter that he was changed; no matter how low he descended; she must still be bound to him.  Whereas he acknowledged no mutual bond; he was a man, and therefore in practice free.

Yet she was as far as ever from projecting escape.  The unjust law was still a law, and irresistible.  Had it been her case that she loved some other man, and his return of love claimed her, then indeed she might dare anything and break her chains.  But the power of love seemed as dead in her as the passion she had once, and only once, conceived.  She was utterly alone.

Morning and noon went by.  She had exhausted herself with ceaseless movement, and now for two or three hours lay on a couch as if asleep.  The fever burned upon her forhead and in her breath.

But at length endurance reached its limits.  As she lay still, a thought had taken possession of her—­at first rejected again and again, but always returning, and with more tempting persistency.  She could not begin another night without having spoken to some one.  She seemed to have been foresaken for days; there was no knowing how long she might live here in solitude.  When it was nearly five o’clock, she went to her bedroom and prepared for going out.