In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as was
going on in the general brain of the Community. It was a kind of
Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that were
wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure,
and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and
happy life. But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and, having a
decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel it) getting
quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing state of the
world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it
was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be. It was
impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything
in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the
crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its whole surface
portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we
ourselves were in the critical vortex. Our great globe floated in the
atmosphere of infinite space like an unsubstantial bubble. No
sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively
among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning
into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new
observation from that old standpoint.
It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with
the conservatives, the writers of "The North American Review," the
merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those
respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and
mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had
not come into vogue since yesterday morning.
The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness; and as for the
sisterhood, I had serious thoughts of kissing them all round, but
forbore to do so, because, in all such general salutations, the penance
is fully equal to the pleasure. So I kissed none of them; and nobody,
to say the truth, seemed to expect it.
"Do you wish me," I said to Zenobia, "to announce in town, and at the
watering-places, your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the
rights of women?"
"Women possess no rights," said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile;
"or, at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have the
force to exercise them."
She gave me her hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought,
with a pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled light
of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate flame,
flickering and fitful.
"I regret, on the whole, that you are leaving us," she said; "and all
the more, since I feel that this phase of our life is finished, and can
never be lived over again. Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, that I have
been several times on the point of making you my confidant, for lack of
a better and wiser one? But you are too young to be my father
confessor; and you would not thank me for treating you like one of
those good little handmaidens who share the bosom secrets of a
tragedy-queen."