And warriors indeed they seemed—we should say Amazons—wielding, not the weapons of carnal strife, but those mightier arms with which the Spirit doth, at times, endow our race. As for the war they waged, whatever might be the power with whom they were engaged, it seemed to have been a protracted and a desperate one; for, verily, judging from the harsh lines that seamed the faces of those present, one would imagine them to be “rich only in large hurts!”
There were young women present who were clearly under twenty; whose foreheads, when they elevated their eyebrows, were wrinkled and parchment-like as any
“Painful warrior famoused for fight.”
Why this unnatural wilting? would be the certain question of the cool observer. What fearful wrongs have these women suffered? What “contagious blastments?” Is the wicked world arraigned against them for no just cause? Has it combined its respiring masses into one large, simultaneous breath of volcanic cursings, to be wreaked upon their unoffending heads alone? To be sure,
“Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt;”
and can it be that these, too, are “innocents?” It is true, physiology teaches that, when women wither prematurely, acquire an unnatural sharpness of feature, become
“Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity,”
before they have seen years enough for the bloom of the life of true maturity to have freshened on their cheeks and foreheads, there must be some cause for it. Common sense teaches, too, that that cause is most likely to be, originally, rather a physical than a spiritual one—that mental aberration, dogged and sullen moods, one-ideaed abstractions, a general peevishness and fretful discontent, a suspicious unbelief in the warm-blooded genialities, and much enduring sympathies of those around them, whose lives are intact—or, in other words, who have held themselves, in health, through nature, near to God—must have its source in some evil not entirely foreign to themselves.
Ask the wise physician why are these things so? He will answer, God has so ordered this material universe, that, while we live in it, we must conform to its laws; that, however powerful our spiritual entity, our relations to this life must, to be happy, be normal.
But this is prosing. It may, or it may not, account, in part, for the combative and generally corrugated aspect of this conventicle of the “strong-minded,” to which we have been introduced. Now let us listen!