Yet even here he has not struck all truth. It is the most improbable thing in the world that any woman should have built up such a wall around herself as is represented here. It is morally impossible that such a woman as Hannah Thurston should have done it. It is simply unnatural. It might, perhaps, happen, just as a woman might happen to have been born with five fingers on each hand. But it is not with freaks of Nature, it is with Nature, that we have to deal. Girls may please themselves with fine-sounding phrases about equal powers and equal rights in marriage, but they generally vanish with the first approach of a living affection. No idea of independence or equality ever, we dare affirm, came between a great nature and its great love. No woman of exalted aims and large capacities, it may be safely said, will ever be held back from love, or even from marriage, by any scruples as to her relative standing. The stumbling-block in the way of such a woman as Hannah Thurston would not be a dread of the "submission of love," but rather of a submission without love, a submission of mere contiguity to somewhat hard, false, coarse, unjust, naming itself with a name to which it had no title. If she trusted her lover thoroughly, she would intrust all risks to love. She would know with her head and feel with her heart, that, with the chivalry, the intensity, the reverence, the elevation of such a sentiment as she imagined, there could be neither bondage nor freedom, neither mine nor thine, but a oneness that would bring all relations into harmony with itself. The very essence of love is humility, and at the same time its glory is that it abolishes all laws, all rights, all powers, and is to itself alone law, right, and power. By the completeness of self-abnegation may the footsteps of love be traced. This partially the author recognizes, choosing it for the conclusion of the whole matter, but erring in that he makes it come with resistance and reluctance, the conquest of love, instead of spontaneously and unconsciously, its necessary concomitant. In the hero of the story and his relations to the heroine, with occasional questionable traits, we find often a generosity, delicacy, and devotion which give promise of good. A man who can conceive a character so much above the common level, where the common level has always been low, cannot fail by continued observation and candid thinking to rise still higher. Frequently already, seeming hardly to be conscious of it, he impinges upon a far-reaching, deep-lying, but generally unrecognized truth. When men shall have come to study the nature of woman, instead of haranguing about her duties, a great point will have been gained. The blemishes which we have pointed out, and others which we have not pointed out, are only blemishes, and chiefly upon the surface. They mar, but they do not vitiate.