woman, and whom she loved, are not here. To the world's triumph they
belong not, and we honor the decency and self-respect which consign them
to oblivion. Nor shall we endeavor to lift the veil which she has thus
thrown over the most intimate portion of her private life. We will not
ask any _Chronique Scandaleuse_, of which there are plenty, to supply
any hiatus in the _dramatis personae_ of her life. We shall take her as
she gives herself to us, bringing out the full significance of what she
says, but not interpolating with it what other people say. For she has
been generous in telling us all that it imports us most to know.
The itching curiosity of the spiteful or the vicious must seek its
gratification at other hands than ours: we will not be its ministers.
With all this, we are not obliged to shut our eyes to the true
significance of what she tells us, or to assume that in the account
she gives us of herself there is necessarily less self-deception than
self-judgment generally exhibits. If she mistakes the selfish for the
heroic, exalts a gratification into a duty, and preaches to her sex as
from the standpoint of a morality superior to theirs, we shall set it
down as it seems to us. But, for the sake of manhood as well as of
womanhood, we would not that any mean or malignant hand should endeavor
to show where she failed, and how.

Was she not to all of us, in our early years, a name of doubt, dread,
and enchantment? Did not all of us feel, in our young admiration for
her, something of the world's great struggle between conservative
discipline and revolutionary inspiration? We knew our parents would not
have us read her, _if they knew_. We knew they were right. Yet we read
her at stolen hours, with waning and still entreated light; and as we
read, in a dreary wintry room, with the flickering candle warning us
of late hours and confiding expectations, the atmosphere grew warm and
glorious about us,--a true human company, a living sympathy crept near