“But now, what shall I do with my beautiful fright, Neb-ta, Sir Charleroy?” “Put her away, in mind, amid the galaxies of woman deities; mythical in all but the pitiful sincerity of the adoration of their devotees and in the greatness of the truths they vaguely articulated. See, I’ll interpret: Isis going round the world to gather up the fragments of her dismembered husband. Woman’s ministry; the restoration of man; wife consecration to an only love. Then there was not only beautiful widowhood, second only to beautiful wifehood, but also the spinster sister. Hail Egypt! Thy Sphinx saw further than our peoples of boasted civilizations. At our best we never rose so near to a just altitude as to attempt the deification of the maiden sister, the omnipresent angel, who mothers other people’s children as if they were her own. Egypt worshipped motherhood, perhaps grossly, in adoring the earth’s fructifications, but she did not overlook those pious souls who in a glorious self-abnegation play waiting-maids to the real queens of earth, the child-bearers. I’d never tire praising the child-bearers, or all who love them, for they that bring forth a life are greater than the greatest kingly man-slayer on earth. The world is upside down; no religion is wholly false that aids to right it in any degree. Hail, creeds of Egypt, or any other land, that seek to efface from fame’s pages the names of life-destroyers that thereon may chiefly shine the names of those who give or save life.” “Oh, oscillating Sir Charleroy, thou art just and courtly now.” “Praise me, then! Mankind would average better by far than it does if all were right half the time.” “Would I could gather all the threads of to-day’s blessed communings into a golden band to support over my heart faith’s breastplate.” “I can give thee its summary: God, a beauty Creator, out of all things hideous in His good Providence will emerge the fine, tender and loving. Neb-ta, Egypt’s ideal, carried the lotus, the flower of unrestrained pleasure, as her scepter; Neb-ta-like the influences that sway most human hearts to-day; but the Rose of the world has blossomed. Mary, the flower of women. They that love and serve, as that warm, red-hearted woman, shall at last reign in eternal bliss within the ruby walls of the New Jerusalem.” “I’m with the knight, to proclaim thy Rose!” “A good profession! It will be well if we remember that woman is as essential to religion as religion to women. As for man he needs the one as the interpreter of the other. Therefore, it was that God sent to earth a flower that could talk.” [Illustration] CHAPTER X. AFTER EVE, ESTHER OR MARY? “Still slowly passed the melancholy day, And still the stranger wist not where to stray: The world was sad—the Garden was a wild; And man, the hermit, sighed—till woman smiled.”—MILTON.