"Always," returned her friend. "As woman stands now in the estimate of man, her chances for happiness are almost wholly on the side of old-maidism. Still, freedom is the price of struggle and combat; and woman will first have to show, in actual strife, that she is the equal of her present lord." "Then you would turn every home into a battlefield?" said Mrs. Emerson. "Every home in which there is a tyrant and an oppressor," was the prompt answer. "Many fair lands, in all ages, have been trampled down ruthlessly by the iron feet of war; and that were better, as the price of freedom, than slavery." Irene sighed again, and was again silent. "What," she asked, "if the oppressor is so much stronger than the oppressed that successful resistance is impossible? that with every struggle the links of the chain that binds her sink deeper into her quivering flesh?" "Every age and every land have seen noble martyrs in the cause of freedom. It is better to die for liberty than live an ignoble slave," answered the tempter. "And I will die a free woman." This Irene said in her heart. CHAPTER XII. IN BONDS. _SENTIMENTS_ like these, coming to Irene as they did while she was yet chafing under a recent collision with her husband, and while the question of submission was yet an open one, were near proving a quick-match to a slumbering mine in her spirit, and had not her husband been in a more passive state than usual, there might have been an explosion which would have driven them asunder with such terrific force that reunion must have been next to impossible. It would have been well if their effects had died with the passing away of that immediate danger. But as we think so we incline to act. Our sentiments are our governors; and of all imperious tyrants, false sentiments are the most ruthless. The beautiful, the true, the good they trample out of the heart with a fiery malignity that knows no touch of pity; for the false is the bitter enemy of the true and makes with it no terms of amity. The coldness which had followed their reconciliation might have gradually given way before the warmth of genuine love, if Irene had been left to the counsels of her own heart; if there had been no enemy to her peace, like Mrs. Talbot, to throw in wild, vague thoughts of oppression and freedom among the half-developed opinions which were forming in her mind. As it was, a jealous scrutiny of words and actions took the place of that tender confidence which was coming back to Irene's heart, and she became watchfully on the alert; not, as she might have been, lovingly ministrant.