Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has not yet spoken audible thunder:  the terrible aggregate social woman, of man’s creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless, upheld, esteemed, applauded:  a mark of civilization, on to which our human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner.  She exhibits virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood of victims on it.  Her fold is a genial climate and the material pleasures for the world’s sheepy:  worshipping herself, she claims the sanctification of a performed religion.  She is gentle when unassailed, going her way serenely, with her malady in the blood.  When the skin bears witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is a short convulsion.  She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior members:  the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and retains; rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence, and she lives all in the present.  Her subjects are the mixed Subservient; among her rebellious are earth’s advanced, who have cold a morning on their foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they would but shame and purify by other methods than the druggist.  She loves nothing.  Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious.  On that merit she subsists.

The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the use of the rhetorician’s brass instrument.  As she is one of the Powers giving life and death, one may be excused.  This tremendous queen of the congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid on quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to misery and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad; and particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of women.  We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to gratify them.  She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she will only give men her half-the-world’s assistance to uplift the fabric comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not by any means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are privately exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown boys—­the brisker at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the fiction.

In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its royal laxity, to rigidity.  Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter of jest, and the sinner exposed stood ‘sola’ to receive the brand.  A beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband’s countenance if she was to take one of the permanent steps in public places.  The party of Lady Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge celestial bolts and sulphur