What, then, had moved her to swamp it?

Her heart answered.  And that heart also was arraigned:  and the heart’s fleshly habitation acting on it besides:  so flagellant of herself was she:  covertly, however, and as the chaste among women can consent to let our animal face them.  Not grossly, still perceptibly to her penetrative hard eye on herself, she saw the senses of the woman under a charm.  She saw, and swam whirling with a pang of revolt from her personal being and this mortal kind.

Her rational intelligence righted her speedily.  She could say in truth, by proof, she loved the man:  nature’s love, heart’s love, soul’s love.  She had given him her life.

It was a happy cross-current recollection, that the very beginning and spring of this wild cast of her life, issued from something he said and did (merest of airy gestures) to signify the blessing of life—­how good and fair it is.  A drooping mood in her had been struck; he had a look like the winged lyric up in blue heavens:  he raised the head of the young flower from its contemplation of grave-mould.  That was when he had much to bear:  Mrs. Burman present:  and when the stranger in their household had begun to pity him and have a dread of her feelings.  The lucent splendour of his eyes was memorable, a light above the rolling oceans of Time.

She had given him her life, little aid.  She might have closely counselled, wound in and out with his ideas.  Sensible of capacity, she confessed to the having been morally subdued, physically as well; swept onward; and she was arrested now by an accident, like a waif of the river-floods by the dip of a branch.  Time that it should be!  But was not Mr. Durance, inveighing against the favoured system for the education of women, right when he declared them to be unfitted to speak an opinion on any matter external to the household or in a crisis of the household?  She had not agreed with him:  he presented stinging sentences, which irritated more than they enlightened.  Now it seemed to her, that the model women of men make pleasant slaves, not true mates:  they lack the worldly training to know themselves or take a grasp of circumstances.

There is an exotic fostering of the senses for women, not the strengthening breath of vital common air.  If good fortune is with them, all may go well:  the stake of their fates is upon the perpetual smooth flow of good fortune.  She had never joined to the cry of the women.  Few among them were having it in the breast as loudly.

Hard on herself, too, she perceived how the social rebel had reduced her mind to propitiate a simulacrum, reflected from out, of an enthroned Society within it, by an advocacy of the existing laws and rules and habits.  Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker:  none so conservative.  Not until we are driven back upon an unviolated Nature, do we call to the intellect to think radically:  and then we begin to think of our fellows.