Of this type are those whom the straining of a vocabulary has
called--Suffragette. They are merely Nature's correctives. Of
definite change in the position of women they will effect nothing.
They are not regulars in the great army; only the wandering
adventurers who take up arms for any cause, that they may be in the
noise of the battle. It is the paid army--the regular troops--who
finally place the standard upon the enemy's heights; for it is only
the forces of Life itself that, in this life, are unconquerable.
This, then, is Miss Hallard--adventuress in a great philosophy. Her
thin lips, her shifting, disconcerting eyes, set deep beneath the
brows; the long and narrow face, the high forehead on which the hair
hangs heavily; that thin, reedy body, that ill-formed, unnatural
breast which never was meant to suckle a child or nurse the drooping
of a man's head--all these are the signs of her calling. A woman--by
the irony of a fate that has thwarted the original design of Nature.
Sally Bishop is a woman before everything. Miss Hallard is a woman
last of all. How these two, in their blatant contrasts, were brought
together, is an example of one of those mysterious forces in the great
machinery of life which we are unable to comprehend.
Pages:
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76