which argues that, for a woman who moved in the highest
social circles, she enjoyed a reasonably good reputation.

But Joseph had a different tale to tell. He said that the
poor lady became desperately enamored of his beauty and
day by day assailed his continence, but that he was as deaf
to her amorous entreaties as Adonis to the dear
blandishments of Venus Pandemos. Finally she became so
importunate that he was compelled to seek safety in flight.
He saved his virtue but lost his vestments. It was a narrow
escape, and the poor fellow must have been dreadfully
frightened. Suppose that the she-Tarquin had
accomplished her hellish design, and that her victim had
died of shame? She would have changed the whole
current of the world's history! Old Jacob and his other
interesting if less virtuous sons, would have starved to
death, and there would have been neither Miracles nor
Mosaic Law, Ten Commandments nor Vicarious
Atonement. Talmage and other industrious exploiters of
intellectual tommyrot, now ladling out saving grace for
fat salaries, might be as unctuously mouthing for Mumbo
Jumbo, fanning the flies off some sacred bull or bowing the
knee to Baal. The Potiphar-Joseph episode deserves the
profoundest study. It was an awful crisis in the history of
the human race! How thankful we, who live in these latter
days, should be that the female rape fiend has passed into
the unreturning erstwhile with the horned unicorn and
dreadful hippogriff, the minotaur and other monsters that
once affrighted the fearful souls of men--that sensuous
sirens do not so assail us and rip our coat-tails off in a foul