acts themselves."

"Is your object religion?" asked Mandeville, simply. Constance was
startled: the question was novel. "I fear not," said she, after a
moment's hesitation, and with a downcast face.

"As I thought," returned Mandeville. "Now listen. The reason why you
feel weariness more than those around you, is solely because your mind is
more expansive. Small minds easily find objects: trifles amuse them; but
a high soul covets things beyond its daily reach; trifles occupy its aim
mechanically; the thought still wanders restless. This is the case with
you. Your intellect preys upon itself. You would have been happier if
your rank had been less;" Constance winced--(she thought of Godolphin);
"for then you would have been ambitious, and aspired to the very rank that
now palls upon you." Mandeville continued--

"You women are at once debarred from public life and yet influence it.
You are the prisoners, and yet the despots of society. Have you talents?
it is criminal to indulge them in public; and thus, as talent cannot be
stifled, it is misdirected in private; you seek ascendency over your own
limited circle; and what should have been genius degenerates into cunning.
Brought up from your cradles to dissembling your most beautiful
emotions--your finest principles are always tinctured with artifice. As
your talents, being stripped of their wings are driven to creep along the
earth, and imbibe its mire and clay; so are your affections perpetually
checked and tortured into conventional paths, and a spontaneous feeling is
punished as a deliberate crime. You are untaught the broad and sound
principles of life; all that you know of morals are its decencies and
forms. Thus you are incapable of estimating the public virtues and the
public deficiencies of a brother or a son; and one reason why _we_ have no