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