I started up from my seat.
"Of course!" I exclaimed eagerly, forgetting all my previous fear of him; "I will do all you advise, even if you wish to magnetize me as you magnetized Signor Cellini!"
"I never MAGNETIZED Raffaello," he said gravely; "he was on the verge of madness, and he had no faith whereby to save himself. I simply set him free for a time, knowing that his was a genius which would find out things for itself or perish in the effort. I let him go on a voyage of discovery, and he came back perfectly satisfied. That is all. You do not need his experience."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"You are a woman--your desire is to be well and strong, health being beauty--to love and to be beloved--to wear pretty toilettes and to be admired; and you have a creed which satisfies you, and which you believe in without proofs."
There was the slightest possible tinge of mockery in his voice as he said these words. A tumultuous rush of feelings overcame me. My high dreams of ambition, my innate scorn of the trite and commonplace, my deep love of art, my desires of fame--all these things bore down upon my heart and overcame it, and a pride too deep for tears arose in me and found utterance.
"You think I am so slight and weak a thing!" I exclaimed. "YOU, who profess to understand the secrets of electricity--you have no better instinctive knowledge of me than that! Do you deem women all alike-- all on one common level, fit for nothing but to be the toys or drudges of men? Can you not realize that there are some among them who despise the inanities of everyday life--who care nothing for the routine of society, and whose hearts are filled with cravings that no mere human love or life can satisfy? Yes--even weak women are capable of greatness; and if we do sometimes dream of what we cannot accomplish through lack of the physical force necessary for large achievements, that is not our fault but our misfortune. We did not create ourselves. We did not ask to be born with the over- sensitiveness, the fatal delicacy, the highly-strung nervousness of the feminine nature. Monsieur Heliobas, you are a learned and far- seeing man, I have no doubt; but you do not read me aright if you judge me as a mere woman who is perfectly contented with the petty commonplaces of ordinary living. And as for my creed, what is it to you whether I kneel in the silence of my own room or in the glory of a lighted cathedral to pour out my very soul to ONE whom I know exists, and whom I am satisfied to believe in, as you say, without proofs, save such proofs as I obtain from my own inner consciousness? I tell you, though, in your opinion it is evident my sex is against me, I would rather die than sink into the miserable nonentity of such lives as are lived by the majority of women."