Yet with all the weight of her curse more or less upon her, and with all her sorrows, shattered ideals, wrecked hopes, and lost loves, Accursëd Eve is still the most beautiful, the most perfect figure in creation. Her failings, her vanities, her weaknesses, her sins, arise in the first place from love--even if afterwards, through Coward Adam’s ready encouragement, they degenerate into vice and animalism. Her first impulse in earliest youth is a desire to please Adam,--the same impulse precisely which led her to offer him the forbidden apple in the first days of their mutual acquaintance. She wishes to charm him,--to win his heart,--to endear herself to him in a thousand tender ways,--to wind herself irretrievably round his life. If she succeeds in this aim, she is invariably happy and virtuous. But if she is made to feel that she cannot hold him on whom her thoughts are centred,--if his professed love for her only proves weak and false when put to trial,--if he finds it easy to forget both sentiment and courtesy, and is quick to add insult to injury, then all the finer and more delicate emotions of her nature become warped and unstrung,--and though she endures her suffering because she must, she resents it and takes vengeance when she can. Of resentfulness against wrong and revenge for injustice, come what are called “bad women.” Yet I would humbly venture to maintain that even these “bad” were not bad in the first instance. They were born in the usual way, with the usual Eve impulse,--the desire to please, not themselves, but the opposite sex. If their instinctive efforts have been met with cruelty, oppression, neglect, desertion and sometimes the most heartless and cowardly betrayal, they can scarcely be blamed if they play the same tricks on the unloving, disloyal churls for whom they have perhaps sacrificed the best part of their lives. For innocent faith and trusting love _are_ the best part of every woman’s life; and when these are destroyed by the brutalizing touch of some Coward Adam, the woman may well claim compensation for her soul’s murder. Accursëd Eve! Still she loves,--to find herself fooled and cheated; still she hopes, even while hope eludes her,--still she waits, for what she may never win,--still she prays prayers that may never be answered,--still she bears and rears the men of the future, wondering perchance whether any of them will ever help to do her justice,--will ever place her where she should be, as the acknowledged queenly “help-meet” of her stronger, but less enduring partner! Beautiful, frail, trusting, loving, Accursëd Eve! She bends beneath the curse,--but the clouds are lifting!--there is light in the sky of her future dawn! And it may be that a worse malediction than the one pronounced in Eden, will fall on those who make her burden of life heavier to bear! “IMAGINARY” LOVE