"And by which of my qualities," inquired he, "can you suppose me fitted
for this awful ministry?"
"By your tenderness," I said. "It seems to me the reflection of God's
own love."
"And you call me tender!" repeated Hollingsworth thoughtfully. "I
should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an
inflexible severity of purpose. Mortal man has no right to be so
inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be."
"I do not believe it," I replied.
But, in due time, I remembered what he said.
Probably, as Hollingsworth suggested, my disorder was never so serious
as, in my ignorance of such matters, I was inclined to consider it.
After so much tragical preparation, it was positively rather mortifying
to find myself on the mending hand.
All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according to
the full measure of their capacity. Zenobia brought me my gruel every
day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth must be
told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit by my
bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several gratuitous
throbs to my pulse. Her poor little stories and tracts never half did
justice to her intellect. It was only the lack of a fitter avenue that
drove her to seek development in literature. She was made (among a
thousand other things that she might have been) for a stump oratress.
I recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her mind was full of weeds.
It startled me sometimes, in my state of moral as well as bodily
faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy. She
made no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering
them as with a breeze from her fan. A female reformer, in her attacks
upon society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is
inclined to aim directly at that spot. Especially the relation between
the sexes is naturally among the earliest to attract her notice.
Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her
dress could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her
presence. The image of her form and face should have been multiplied
all over the earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her
as the spectacle of only a few. The stage would have been her proper
sphere. She should have made it a point of duty, moreover, to sit
endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferably to the latter;
because the cold decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost
scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with
her material perfection in its entireness.