There were some nights of deep snowfall, when Charles
Street was white and muffled and the door-bell foredoomed to silence,
which seemed little islands of lamp-light, of enlarged and intensified
vision. They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever
with the same thought--that of finding confirmation in it for this idea
that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the
course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much
less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible) if women
had been able to press down the scale. Verena was full of suggestions
which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the
fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power
and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens,
the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of
between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private
misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very
satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past
accounted for every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it
only made the matter balance properly that the influence of men should
explain the casual irregularities of the other sex.
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