Those who know Woman best, who know what godlessness and lovelessness and failure combined can make of her, will not be much surprised that so many were found to join the Sisterhood, a meeting of which I am about to describe, although its objects were so horrible.
Those scientific Ethics, which are so jubilantly preached by the optimists now-a-days, lead logically to the opinions professed by this sisterhood. The abominations which they contemplated are but the reductio ad absurdum of Utilitarianism, the Morality without a God.
Catherine King was well past forty, a tall, pale, angular, hard-featured woman, with a strong obstinate narrow mind; that type of mind that has done more harm in the world than all the vicious temperaments. Had she been religious she would have been sternly Puritanical, fiercely intolerant, willing to cast her children into the flames if they differed from her own strict views.
But Catherine King was not religious, neither was she a mother, so the intensity of the narrow zeal within her found another vent.
What her past history had been, who she was, none of those who came across her knew. She had no intimates. All that could be said was that she must have been of respectable family, was well educated, and that she had a modest private income on which she contrived to exist comfortably enough.
Catherine King had for some years taken interest in social questions. She became a fanatical Radical, a believer in the more violent Socialist schemes—the champion of the oppressed against the oppressors.
I do not imagine that it was so much the tendency of a logical mind, still less genuine sympathy for the supposed oppressed, that caused her to take up this line, as it was the fever of her vehement temperament driving her to clutch at something in place of love or religion to satisfy its restlessness.
Once having tried them, she became absorbed in these studies; she was enthusiastic, mad, in her hatred, of all that are in authority, of rank, power, law, morality. She had her dreams of the perfect State—a curious State, wherein the individual was considered of no account, was as a worm, to be trodden under foot beneath the progress of the mighty aggregate, the happy race; though how a race can be happy while its individuals are not so, was a question that troubled her as little as it does most other votaries of the religion of humanity, that car of Juggernaut to the fanatics of science.
She became a monomaniac, and of that sort of which rulers of men are made.