Profoundly impressed by the conviction that she held her talent in trust, she worked steadily, looking neither to the right nor left, but keeping her eyes fixed upon that day when she should be called to render an account to Him who would demand His own with interest.  Instead of becoming flushed with success, she grew daily more cautious, more timid, lest inadvertence or haste should betray her into errors.  Consequently as the months rolled away, each magazine article seemed an improvement on the last, and lifted her higher in public favor.  The blacksmith’s grandchild had become a power in society.

Feeling that a recluse life would give her only partial glimpses of that humanity which she wished to study, she moved in the circle of cultivated friends who now eagerly stretched out their arms to receive her; and “keeping herself unspotted from the world,” she earnestly scrutinized social leprosy, and calmly watched the tendency of American thought and feeling.

Among philosophic minds she saw an inclination to ignore the principles of such systems as Sir William Hamilton’s, and to embrace the modified and subtle materialism of Buckle and Mill, or the gross atheism of Buchner and Moleschott.  Positivism in philosophy and pre-Raphaelitism in art, confronted her in the ranks of the literary,—­ lofty idealism seemed trodden down—­pawed over by Carlyle’s “Monster Utilitaria.”

When she turned to the next social stratum she found altars of mammon-groves of Baal, shining Schoe Dagonset up by business men and women of fashion.  Society appeared intent only upon reviving the offering to propitiate evil spirits; and sometimes it seemed thickly sprinkled with very thinly disguised refugee Yezidees, who, in the East, openly worshipped the Devil.

Statesmen were almost extinct in America—­a mere corporal’s guard remained, battling desperately to save the stabbed constitution from howling demagogues and fanatics, who raved and ranted where Washington, Webster, and Calhoun had once swayed a free and happy people.  The old venerated barriers and well-guarded outposts, which decorum and true womanly modesty had erected on the frontiers of propriety, were swept away in the crevasse of sans souci manners that threatened to inundate the entire land; and latitudinarianism in dress and conversation was rapidly reducing the sexes to an equality, dangerous to morals and subversive of all chivalric respect for woman.

A double-faced idol, fashion and flirtation, engrossed the homage of the majority of females, while a few misguided ones, weary of the inanity of the mass of womanhood and desiring to effect a reform, mistook the sources of the evil, and, rushing to the opposite extreme, demanded power, which as a privilege they already possessed, but as a right could not extort.

A casual glance at the surface of society seemed to justify Burke’s conclusion, that “this earth is the bedlam of our system”; but Edna looked deeper, and found much that encouraged her, much that warmed and bound her sympathies to her fellow-creatures.  Instead of following the beaten track she struck out a new path, and tried the plan of denouncing the offence, not the offender; of attacking the sin while she pitied the sinner.