Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/382

366 which we look for in vain in every direction, and which life can offer us nowhere but in true Jove. Whithersoever a man's fancy, his discoveries, or aspirations, may lead him, nothing in the whole domain of nature can take the place of the relationship that true love unfolds to two thinking and harmonious beings. Such a double life alone is true life. Place man into nature alone, as its sole ruler, place all its secrets, all its pleasures at his disposal, make earth into a paradise or a heaven for him wherein every fabled splendor becomes a reality—still he will remain a stranger in his great realm, he will feel forsaken and impoverished with all his riches, he will despair in all his wisdom, his thought will search through all the spaces of the universe to find the something that he lacks, his fancy will strive to fill out the deadening void with the pictures of that which he longs for, and he will arraign nature, who has lavished her gifts upon him with the supplicating reproach, take everything from me, wherewith you have vainly sought to bless me, and give me instead that which you have denied me, the best, the most indispensable gift of all, give me a woman!

And if nature should then grant his wish, and he should hold in his arms the object of his desire, would it be with the Christian barbaric greeting, I will be "your master," that he would receive her?

Let us now turn from the pre-eminently "fair" to the pre-eminently "strong" sex. The appellation itself indicates that as grace is considered the chief