One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
and help. Essential immediate help was to be given besides the
noble benevolence of mind. Novel ideas of manliness and the
world’s need for it were printed on her understanding. For
what could women do in aid of a good cause! She fawned: she
deemed herself very despicably her hero’s inferior. The thought
of him enclosed her. In a prison, the gaoler is a demi-Godhued
bright or black, as it may be; and, by the present arrangement
between the sexes, she, whom the world allowed
not to have an intimation from eye or ear, or from nature’s
blood-ripeness in commune with them, of certain matters,
which it suffers to be notorious, necessarily directed her appeal
almost in worship to the man, who was the one man
endowed to relieve, and who locked her mouth for shame.
Thus was she, too, being put into her woman’s harness of
the bit and the blinkers, and taught to know herself for the
weak thing, the gentle parasite, which the fiction of our civilization
expects her, caressingly and contemptuously, to become
in the active, while it is exacted of hero Comedy of
Clowns!—that in the passive she be a rockfortress impregnable,
not to speak of magically encircled. She must also
have her feelings; she must not be an unnatural creature.
And she must have a sufficient intelligence; for her stupidity
does not flatter the possessing man. It is not an organic growth
that he desires in his mate, but a happy composition. You see
the world which comes of the pair.
This burning Nesta, Victor’s daughter, tempered by Nataly’s
milder blood, was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the
knowledge of life, perforce of the hardness upon pure metal,
left a strengthening for generous imagination. She did not
sit to brood on her injured senses or set them through speculation
touching heat; they were taken up and consumed by
the fire of her mind. Nor had she leisure for the abhorrences,
in a heart all flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore. Self
was as urgent in her as in most of the young; but the gift of
humour, which had previously diverted it, was now the quick
feeling for her sisterhood, through the one piteous example
she knew; and broadening it, through her insurgent abasement
on their behalf, which was her scourged pride of sex.
She but faintly thought of blaming the men whom her soul
besought for justice, for common kindness, to women. There
was the danger, that her aroused young ignorance would
charge the whole of the misery about and abroad upon the
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