Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the near-to-happiness ratings over-night.  She thinned her lips, and her cheeks glowed.  An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her.  The choice now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think.  She took the latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held a candle in a windy darkness.  She saw no Justice there.  The sensational immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required for the true sublime.  And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any realm!  Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they feel when it is refused them.  When they know they feel, they have begun to reflect.  The void of Justice is a godless region.  Women, to whom the solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes of their storm, ask themselves whether they are God’s creatures or man’s.  The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their human masters.  Young women, animated by the passions their feeling bosoms of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish an abstract justice from a concrete.  They are of the tribe too long hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract.  So it is with them, that their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of boys.  He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter—­the Biblical Hebrew’s right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance.  By such a maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth.  If women can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they belong to God—­of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they will set the one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other, urging them unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and his laws altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who shines in thought.  It is a manner whereby the desperately harried among these creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an agreeable, almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.

There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator sensible to the pulses of his audience.  Justice compels at times.  In truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman unexplained.  Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft brown of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart’s doings overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.