noise and bustle, and eating and swilling, and disputation and slang,
wild glee, and wilder despair, amongst those who come back from the race-
course to the inns in the county town. At one of these taverns, neither
the best nor the worst, and in a small narrow slice of a room that seemed
robbed from the landing-place, sat Mrs. Crane, in her iron-gray silk
gown. She was seated close by the open window, as carriages, chaises,
flies, carts, vans, and horsemen succeeded each other thick and fast,
watching the scene with a soured, scornful look. For human joy, as for
human grief, she had little sympathy. Life had no Saturnalian holidays
left for her. Some memory in her past had poisoned the well-springs of
her social being. Hopes and objects she had still, but out of the wrecks
of the natural and healthful existence of womanhood, those objects and
hopes stood forth exaggerated, intense, as are the ruling passions in
monomania. A bad woman is popularly said to be worse than a wicked man.
If so, partly because women, being more solitary, brood more unceasingly
over cherished ideas, whether good or evil; partly also, for the same
reason that makes a wicked gentleman, who has lost caste and character,
more irreclaimable than a wicked clown, low-born and lowbred, namely,
that in proportion to the loss of shame is the gain in recklessness: but
principally, perhaps, because in extreme wickedness there is necessarily
a distortion of the reasoning faculty; and man, accustomed from the
cradle rather to reason than to feel, has that faculty more firm against
abrupt twists and lesions than it is in woman; where virtue may have left
him, logic may still linger; and he may decline to push evil to a point
at which it is clear to his understanding that profit vanishes and
punishment rests; while woman, once abandoned to ill, finds sufficient
charm in its mere excitement, and, regardless of consequences, where the
man asks, "Can I?" raves out, "I will!" Thus man may be criminal through
cupidity, vanity, love, jealousy, fear, ambition; rarely in civilized,
that is, reasoning life, through hate and revenge; for hate is a