"Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should
have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of
water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its
work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it
will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act.
If Goethe had been stolen away a child, and reared in a robber horde in the
depths of a German forest, do you think the world would have had "Faust"
and "Iphegenie?" But he would have been Goethe still--stronger, wiser than
his fellows. At night, round their watch-fire, he would have chanted wild
songs of rapine and murder, till the dark faces about him were moved and
trembled. His songs would have echoed on from father to son, and nerved
the heart and arm--for evil. Do you think if Napoleon had been born a
woman that he would have been contented to give small tea-parties and talk
small scandal? He would have risen; but the world would not have heard of
him as it hears of him now--a man great and kingly with all his sins; he
would have left one of those names that stain the leaf of every history--
the names of women, who, having power, but being denied the right to
exercise it openly, rule in the dark, covertly, and by stealth, through the
men whose passions they feed on and by whom they climb.

"Power!" she said, suddenly, smiting her little hand upon the rail. "Yes,
we have power; and since we are not to expend it in tunnelling mountains,
nor healing diseases, nor making laws, nor money, nor on any extraneous
object, we expend it on you. You are our goods, our merchandise, our
material for operating on; we buy you, we sell you, we make fools of you,
we act the wily old Jew with you, we keep six of you crawling to our little
feet, and praying only for a touch of our little hand; and they say truly,
there was never an ache or pain or broken heart but a woman was at the
bottom of it. We are not to study law, nor science, nor art, so we study