You do not like this Lizzy Gurney? I know. There are a dozen healthy girls in that country-town whose histories would have been pleasanter to write and to read. I chose hers purposely. I chose a bilious, morbid woman to talk to you of, because American women are bilious and morbid. Men all cling desperately to the old book-type of women, delicate, sunny, helpless. I confess to even a man's hungry partiality for them,--these roses of humanity, their genus and species emphasized by but the faintest differing pungency of temper and common sense,--mere crumpling of the rose-leaves. But how many of them do you meet on the street? McKinstry (with most men) kept this ideal in his brain, and bestowed it on every woman in a street-car possessed of soft eyes, gaiter-boots, and a blush. Dr. Blecker (with all women) saw through that mask, and knew them as they are. He knew there was no more prurient sign of the age of groping and essay in which we live than the unrest and diseased brains of its women. Lizzy Gurney was but like nine-tenths of the unmarried young girls of the Northern States; there was some inactive, dumb power within,--she called it genius; there was a consciousness that with a man's body she would have been more of a man than her brother; there was, stronger than all, the unconquerable craving of Nature for a husband's and child's love,--she, powerless. So it found vent in this girl, as in the others, in perpetual self-analyzing, in an hysteric clinging to one creed after another,--in embracing the chimera of the Woman's-Rights prophets with her brain, and thrusting it aside with her heart: after a while, to lapse all into a marriage, made in heaven or hell, as the case might be. Dr. Blecker used no delicate euphuism in talking of women, which, maybe, was as well. He knew, that, more than men, though quietly, they are facing the problem of their lives, their unused powers, their sham marriages, and speak of these things to their own souls with strong, plebeian words. So much his Northern education opened his eyes to see, but he stopped there; if he had been a clear-sighted truth-seeker, he would have known that some day the problem would be solved, and by no foul Free Love-ism. But Paul was enough Southerner by birth to shrink from all inquiry or disquiet in women. If there were any problem of life for them, Grey Gurney held it solved in her nature: that was all he cared to know. Did she?