Miss Fuller Part 1

Miss Fuller.

April Bernard.

for Henry.

ONE.

News of the wreck made everyone want to be up and going, doing something, talking, moving, to keep the knowledge from puddling and festering. It was a hot July, in the year 1850. Margaret Fuller, their old friend, together with her husband and young son, had been s.h.i.+p-wrecked and drowned, on their voyage home from Europe. No one in the Th.o.r.eau house had slept.

"It's Bedlam!" said Mother, as if the sight of Mr. Emerson coming up the path made it official. One went to see Mr. Emerson; he did not pay calls himself, and certainly not before breakfast. He dipped his ma.s.sive head slightly as he came through the door, a Colossus visiting the Pygmies. Mother's nose came up about even with his middle waistcoat b.u.t.ton.

Mr. Emerson had come to ask Henry to go from Concord to New York and then Fire Island, the site of the wreck, to claim the bodies and other remains. With luck, yet how ridiculous to speak as if luck could ever again be hoped for, Henry would find her book ma.n.u.script.

Anne, his youngest sister, helped Henry pack his satchel. She always helped him if he let her. She tried to persuade him that as this was a delicate errand he would need her to accompany him.

"The ocean may well have stripped her clothes," she said.

He said, "A dead woman is like any dead animal."

It had been nearly a decade earlier, when Anne was twelve years old, that she had first, as she said, "encountered" Miss Fuller. She and her oldest sister, Helen, sometimes still called one of the "girls" although she was well into her twenties, had traveled as guests of Mrs. Deaver on a special trip into Boston. Trips to Boston were the height of excitement, but Anne was always ready to go anywhere, even the next town. All other destinations were known to be inferior to Boston - including New York, Was.h.i.+ngton, and London - with the possible exception of Concord itself and the home of a distinguished relative, a judge, who lived on a promontory in Marblehead. Anne, adopted and by far the youngest in the family, looked forward to Marblehead - someday, they said, she would see it - with especial awe.

Meanwhile, there were the reliable glories of Boston. The always fas.h.i.+onable Mrs. Deaver had purchased a subscription to something called "Conversations," which t.i.tle she p.r.o.nounced with a self-conscious slowing and mouthing, as if the syllables were Italian: "Con-verr-sa.s.s-ee-on-es." Mrs. Deaver had taken a European tour.

For some time Miss Fuller had been "offering" Conversations, on topics of "general interest to ladies of culture," usually at the Peabody home in West Street. But for this exceptional occasion, raising funds for a new progressive school, it was to be a larger gathering at the grander home of Mrs. Vaughn. There had been some confusion and embarra.s.sment about whether or not the girls would need to purchase tickets, but Mrs. Deaver convinced their mother she was welcome to bring them along as guests. Anne was deemed just old enough to behave herself; Sissy, the middle sister, was nursing a slight cough, and had decided to stay at home. The cough may have been a convenience, as she was inclined to regard such outings as frivolous. Helen was perfectly polite but they were to know that she condescended by accepting the invitation. Their brothers John and Henry, meanwhile, had made the breakfast table raucous with predictable jokes about the dangers of the Th.o.r.eau girls "conversing."

"John 'converses' nineteen to the dozen," said Helen crossly from her corner of the stagecoach, "and Henry in certain moods would talk over the last trumpet."

The railroad lines commencing to cross-hatch New England had not reached Concord quite yet in 1841. So it was the Boston stagecoach, on that day offering the unexpected luxury of no other pa.s.sengers, that s.h.i.+elded them from the March sleet, as they were tucked up with blankets and hot bricks wrapped in burlap to warm their feet. Anne reached down to feel the heat from the bricks through her gloves.

Mrs. Deaver inquired politely about their brothers' school and Helen fibbed, saying that attendance was still growing, and they had great hopes for the summer term. There were no such hopes; the school was not making enough to pay and their brothers were exhausted by the work. Anne gamely seconded her sister's remarks, as she often did, with a quiet, "Indeed." This old-womanish habit she had picked up from one of her mother's friends. When Anne needed to disagree, she applied equal economy of means. "Do you really think so," without the interrogative lift, expressed a quiet nay without committing her to the labor and peril of voicing a counter-argument. Her family, who would have liked the argument much better, found this tiresome. No doubt that was the chief reason she persisted.

Mrs. Deaver proceeded to "sell" them on their forthcoming treat.

"The first time I went, in December, it was most elevating. The Peabody ladies have a little shop, completely refined, with hundreds of books and pamphlets. We met in the 'book room,' very cozy. I tried to just get the feeling of the thing, not as a partic.i.p.ant of the Conversatione myself, just a learner, a student. Well, not knowing anything certainly did not restrain Mrs. Delapont; nor her cousin from New York. She opened all of her remarks with 'In New York,' so as we'd know. 'In New York, the question of archaic architecture in private homes, especially broken columns a la grecque, is quite settled.' In New York!"

Helen smiled at Anne.

"No one cared, it was entirely a different matter from what Miss Fuller was offering for our consideration, which I believe concerned the large s.p.a.ces of a geometrically pleasing kind, as in the ancient Acropolis, which is built on the Golden Mean. Things in proportion, 'the a.s.sistance they offer for thought.' "

"Some people," said Helen, "have been known to think perfectly well in meditation cells. Or prisons."

"Certainly, yes, but would they not have thought better and more, more widely, on the Acropolis? That's just the sort of conversation one can run with, as it were, with Miss Fuller in the room. She's got the force of large ideas, even if I'm not sure where the ideas lead because I don't have the reading. Such vistas - Greek, which I believe Miss Fuller actually reads, and those heathen cla.s.sical stories which are really so wise and not at all in contradiction to our own Bible if read rightly, as - allegories."

"Miss Fuller is, I believe, excessively educated?"

"Dear me yes, her father trained her as if she had been a boy. It's made her goggle-eyed and very odd, of course, but she is a female genius, certainly, though I can't say if I know that she is a model of the New Woman, as Elizabeth Peabody claims, or something simply unique -. She speaks like a wonder, can quote anything at all."

"I trust that the slavery question will be addressed."

"Not this afternoon - more cla.s.sics, I think. She does know so many languages. Greek, as I said, Latin, Italian, French, German, and I think someone said she was studying Hebrew, which seems peculiar."

"Henry says that we should all study American," said Anne.

Mrs. Deaver barked a laughing "Hah!"

"Henry is our genius, especially Anne's," said Helen.

"How droll," said Mrs. Deaver. The girls should not worry about their dresses, she went on, as no one would expect them to measure up to Boston fas.h.i.+on. Country girls, she elaborated, might even be said to be in bad taste should they attempt to dress like city girls. She said that skirts were even wider than last winter and that the very latest thing was cuffs decorated with colored silk fancy-work sheathed in Bruges lace.

Anne fingered her plain cuffs of dark red merino, the same fabric and color as the rest of her best coat and dress. Helen, in dark blue, moved her head in a way that could not quite be called "tossing" and looked out the window, apparently seized by a sudden interest in melting snow.

"Surely," she said, staring out, "we should prefer quality and enduring modest beauty of dress to fas.h.i.+onable fripperies."

As Mrs. Deaver adjusted her shoulder cape, revealing her own splendidly embroidered and lace-covered dress cuffs, she demurred, slightly: "I was not speaking of fandoodles and bric-a-brac, dear. Certainly nothing like those turban ta.s.sels on Angela Sawyer's aunt when she visited in the fall."

The memory of the ta.s.sels, and the head that had so unwisely worn them, allowed them all to share in the delight of a shocked pause. Helen arranged herself and embarked on a summary of Mr. Garrison's most recent editorial in the Liberator, which editorial both of her listeners had in point of fact already read. Although she accepted a chicken wing from the hamper, she did not pause to take a bite until they pa.s.sed the Common, when she at last took account of the food she had been using as a sort of conductor's stick.

The Vaughn house occupied most of an entire block; Anne discarded her first impressions that it was a munic.i.p.al hall or a theatre, and took in the fact that it was an actual residence. Mrs. Deaver looked suddenly, ludicrously, shy, as if the granite of her face were visibly eroding to shale and about to slide away. At least the sleet had stopped; the street and steps were dry. Helen tugged at her gloves with an air. If she could gird up, then so could Anne; she retied her bonnet, patted her coil of braids at the back, and gripped the iron railing of the front steps.

Of the preliminaries Anne remembered little, for like an animal in peril she concentrated almost entirely on danger from the moment she stepped inside. Relieved of coat and bonnet, she shrank back, ducking her head to s.h.i.+eld her eyes against the brilliance of the reception hall. Helen, graceful and pretty and lit up by the company, led the way as always, greeting and being introduced. Anne stayed at her sister's side like an ape on a leash, she thought.

Glimpsing her face in one of the large gilt-framed looking-gla.s.ses was a help. She would not, at any rate, hop or gibber. Her face, arguing with her own metaphor, was not at all simian, not like Henry's and Sissy's. The Th.o.r.eau chin was a family trouble, and Sissy's was the worst of all, with that bulge as if she held a whole potato in her mouth. Henry and their father had the chin as well, but were saved by side-whiskers as effective disguise, or rather, counter-balance. Mother, Helen, and John were the handsome ones.

Anne, whose only knowledge of her own ancestry was that she was Mother's third cousin and had been born in Maine, was just different: tall for her age and fair, not especially pretty but clever enough. She suddenly wished she were an actual monkey, like the one a family friend had brought home from the tropics. It died of a cold after a couple of months, but Henry had taken her to visit when it was alive. The monkey's owner had let it out of the cage, and it ran up the book-shelves and sat and chittered on the mantel-shelf over the parlor fire. With its small pink face rimmed in white fur like an Esquimau's, round dark eyes, and s.h.a.ggy grey body that looped about into a long curled tail, it was as fetching as any play-thing. It had bitten her hand hard enough to draw blood. A nasty beast, but kin.

A monkey in Mrs. Vaughn's bright hall could swing up on the curtains and the lamp fittings and no doubt thoroughly avoid conversation. Would a monkey chew on the furniture? That table looked like a glossy caramel cake. Like floating cake. All the furniture - in the bright hall, in the parlor, in the far dining room - seemed to be floating above the ground. It looked dangerously insubstantial; and indeed when she b.u.mped a table it skidded a distance as she jerked back with a stifled shriek. The chairs and tables were actually fitted with gilt feet, tiny wheeled slippers, as if they were about to dash off to a ball. Someone said the furniture was French.

More danger - in the form of strange faces that looked and then quickly looked away, or worse, looked and stared - manifested itself. And the ladies were, as Mrs. Deaver had forecast, in disconcertingly wide skirts. Upside-down flowers: Several of the younger ladies appeared to have sprouted a corolla of stiff petals opening out from a tiny calyx of waist, which petals drooped to the floor. In this inverted vision, the arms were leaves and the neck, the brief stem. Viola bostonia or perhaps Lupinus peabodacea. Curls bounced, framing each maiden forehead as so many corkscrewed roots, and the air in the rooms surrounded these delicate roots with a sort of pellucid mulch. Water flowers? Nymphaea conversationis. She decided to sketch her visions, once she was safely home with her paper and drawing pencils; she barely heard the questions posed about her family, her interest in antiquity, and the depth of Concord snows. Her drawing began to take shape in her mind - it was of lady-flowers in a gla.s.s vase and a monkey, fingering their skirts, arrayed upon a table-top that resembled a sugar-iced cake.

Two ladies wearing spectacles were introduced, their eyes nearly invisible as the lenses flashed with reflected light. One was the elder Miss Peabody, Elizabeth, the teacher and editor, who immediately turned away to begin speaking to someone else; the other was her sister Mary. Mary told Anne that she had heard of her interest in art. When she lowered her head confidentially, her eyes were revealed, wet and golden-brown as a trout's.

"At present," said Mary, "my sister Sophia - she is not here today but is home with a migraine - has been engaged to copy the Copley portrait in Mrs. Vaughn's sitting room. If it is a success, Mrs. Vaughn will hang it in her summer house."

"I also have a sister Sophia - we always call her Sissy - who is also at home, with a chill. But she does not paint - and I have never taken lessons."

"With our two Sophias absent, we must count on Miss Fuller to make up the deficit of wisdom."

The Peabody sisters were jostled away before any more could be said. In later years Anne would remember Mary's lugubrious remark as a kind of emblem of the heavy, unamused repartee known as "Boston wit."

Now the movement of the crowd was prodigious; perhaps the ladies as well as the chairs had little gilt wheels on their feet; certainly they moved in a gliding motion, when given ample width of floor to cross, their skirts swaying in a syncopated rhythm, a half beat behind each forward plunge, like the skirts of skaters. It was almost impossible to tell about the feet by looking; as well as fas.h.i.+onably wider, the Boston ladies' skirts were also markedly longer. Helen, although like Anne limp of skirt and exposed of ankle, was charming a pair of elderly ladies she had just met - they clasped her between them as they all sashayed - by scolding them about slavery in Texas.

A largish woman in s.h.i.+ny magenta silk blocked half the entrance to the large room set up for the Conversation. This must be Miss Fuller - her calyx-waist was not small, her large bust was not fully subdued by her corsets, and the sense of something barely pinned down, like a tent in a gale, was present in the bulges of her figure, the large fair hair fixed it appeared in many places but still sliding to one side, the curls jigging at her temples, and in the movement of her arms, which seemed to be gesturing in great labor against an invisible wind. Helen tugged on her sister's hand and they made their way to a settee beside Mrs. Deaver, who had found a chair and was trying and only just failing to look regal.

Tiny Mrs. Vaughn smiled as everyone sat down and then amidst approving chuckles found a footstool on which to stand. She spoke a few words of appreciation for the pleasure - or perhaps she should say, the pleasurable effort of the mind - they were about to share with Miss Fuller. Her erudition, her writing for and editing of The Dial, and the fascinating pamphlet newly published about the education of young ladies - copies are available in the reception room and of course at the Misses Peabodys' shop, yes, those lovely blue covers, and at a nominal cost for Conversation subscribers to defray publication expenses only - were familiar to them all, she hoped. Yes, the proceeds from today's special talk would be for Mrs. Somebody Mumble's new school - modeled with the guidance of Mr. Horace Mann - and we are all enthusiasts for the progressive education of young women. Naturally, as this is a theme of Miss Fuller's talks, and of her life, she has generously agreed to speak on behalf of this cause.

("Does she receive a fee today then?" Anne whispered. Helen almost imperceptibly shrugged.) Today - and the ladies were urged to take care, as tea-cups were now being pa.s.sed amongst them, and yes that is Mrs. Wadsworth's famous marmalade sponge! - they would be taking up the thread dropped with such suspense before in December: What Can the Cla.s.sical Age Teach Us About Woman Today?

Anne spilt her tea entirely out of her cup and smeared jam on her sleeve. In the midst of her shame, which mounted as Miss Fuller's advance to the front of the room was delayed by the mopping and dabbing of several napkins, she closed her eyes and subsided into a stunned stillness. For some time she was not able to listen. Eventually the French-horn notes of Miss Fuller's most emphasized words came through, as the mortified pulse of blood in her head beat less fiercely to the speaker's rhythm: "... Not so much the Greeks as the Romans ... Education ... Reverence for the Female Principle, which we must not confuse with reverence for the Actual Females, the Wives and Daughters. But there were Rights of Woman as well as Man, in corners of that empire and in many other societies ..."

Gradually Anne came to understand that no one was looking at her. It was just a cup of tea, nothing even broken, and if the stain persisted they could turn the sleeve at home. No one was looking at her.

Miss Fuller now was clearly speaking about the present day, and Anne opened her eyes to wonder how they had vaulted over the centuries so quickly. Helen beside her was at full attention - the subject was the need today, in Boston and throughout this country, to explore the full capacities of both men and women.

"You ask, But will not women cease to be womanly, if they are thrust into the spheres of learning, of philosophy, of political life? I do not urge any 'thrusting,' no such unnatural movement, but only what is natural, the leaning towards, through inclinations which are as in-born in some women as they are in most men. Certainly most women must continue to be womanly, and concerned with children, with home and hearth, with all the fine things that make our lives n.o.ble and sweet - producing such matchless sponge and tea as we have drunk - and spilt - here today...." Miss Fuller paused.

Laughter fluttered through the room. They were looking at her again. Some more moments pa.s.sed; life returned.

"... For how many of us may be destined for a public stage? Not from eagerness to perform for applause, but from a sense of duty, of the rightness of a crusade? If we do not change our minds about what women may do, how can we hope to change the injustice, the poverty, and the mistreatment of fellow souls whom we see daily about us? If we cannot change our minds about what women may do, how can we, my sisters, hope to see the world change for the better and make its progress to that Finer Day we await in our hearts and minds and souls?"

A brocade drapery, of silvery blue, swagged the window recess behind Miss Fuller. It looked like a s.h.i.+p's sail. Anne began counting the panes in the enormous windows.

"Surely you have yourselves known someone - an aunt, a mother, a sister, or you, your own self - who has an inclination towards some area of thought or action that our prejudices say cannot, or should not, be entertained? How often have I heard that a young woman should not be taught Greek, as it will damage her brain, stunt her growth, possibly unfit her for life itself - and yet how I loved to learn Greek, and Latin, and the mathematics, and to read philosophy. And I dare say, these years later, that I am healthy enough."

Each window was three rows high, each row of four tall panes each, with an arch at the top, of gla.s.s panels in a fan pattern. The windows looked on a desolate wintry back garden; as Anne craned her neck to watch, a white terrier with brown spots sped down a path.

"Has any young girl of your acquaintance a knack for the natural sciences? Can you imagine a day when she might study the sciences at a college, as men do? We have heard of such colleges, small ones, established in Switzerland and in France so that women may gaze through telescopes and explore the bituminous horizons of chemistry, just within these last few years. Think of Miss Herschel, England's famed Comet Catcher! Why not here? Why should the world of science, the glorious future of our understanding, be deprived of those intellects which are suited for her study and promulgation?

"Some of you may have heard the story about my little adventure - near misadventure - at the Harvard College Library. It is a sanctum forbidden to women; and yet I knew of its heavy-laden shelves, its reference volumes, encylcopediae and records and almanacks from other centuries and other countries. As I was laboring on a translation from the German last year, I found that I too wished to consult some of these books, and a friend offered to go to the library for me, to consult a reference work, in German, about the reign of Catherine the Great - my problem concerned military matters on the Russian steppe in the last century - but I declined his kind offer. For one thing, his knowledge of German was inferior to my own. For another, I knew myself to be embarked on a work of serious, and valuable, scholars.h.i.+p. I knew also that any man from anywhere in the world engaged in such work would be able to use the Harvard Library. And so -"

Miss Fuller paused for the full effect, her forehead glistening. Anne was still looking into the garden. The terrier had a grey squirrel in his mouth and was shaking it vigorously.

"Yes, I did! I walked right up the steps of the famed Gore Hall. I ignored the initial efforts to impede me, I announced to the librarians the nature of my task, and - I think they were simply too amazed to stop me - I found my books, solved my problem, and, much to the evident dismay of the door-keeper, I have been a faithful visitor to that sanctum ever since!"

She needed to wait for the exclamations, laughter, and light applause to die away.

"Yes, I did enjoy my little triumph. Yet I know it to be small indeed. For consider! Is Woman truly revered in any area of life? I do not speak of your individual domestic arrangements where I trust such ladies as yourselves are treated with the respect, with the reverence, due to you from your admirable husbands. Mr. Harvard College himself may have the good manners briefly to forget his own benighted prejudice about women in his library - as a matter of politeness. But his law does not change. And in the eyes of the real Law, the laws of the town and the state and the country? We are nothing."

The animals had disappeared into the shrubbery. If Anne closed one eye, the right-hand window was filled with the black blue-green of a fir-tree that pressed against the house. If she closed the other eye, only half the window was dark, and the rest was white with the light of the clouded sky.

"Stop squinting!" Helen hissed and pinched her, hard, on the hand. Fortunately no one noticed, as Miss Fuller was now speaking at an orator's pitch, her dampened fair curls drooping, elongated nearly to her shoulders.

"You have less, in the eyes of the Law, than a seamstress of a hundred years ago, or Shakespeare's Greasy Joan who 'keel'd the pot'! A peasant woman in medieval England, married as she may well have been, owned the humble property her father left her, and owned the property she held with her husband jointly if he died. Those laws were changed in England (and its colonies) in the eighteenth century and changed again, not for the better, thirty years ago. In an effort to sh.o.r.e up its great estates, to keep financial and political power in the hands of its aristocracy, England dis-enfranchised its entire female population! Primogeniture does not only a.s.sure the eldest son inherits; it is also another name for pus.h.i.+ng women out of whatever public role, whatever autonomous power, they had enjoyed hitherto. In such an era as this, this nineteenth century of progress and industry and the advance of learning and science, it is a shock, a disgrace, that women virtually have been stripped of their dignity and property rights!"

An agitation on the settee signaled what was about to come from Helen.

"Miss Fuller!" Silence, and a craning of all necks. "What about the black men, our brothers in chains, who have no property rights, and not even the rights to their own bodies, and the bodies of their wives and children?"

The speaker reached her hands in a sudden gesture over the heads of her audience, as if she could clasp Helen's. "My dear - You speak for us all - I think I recognize you from the Anti-Slavery Women of Boston -"

"Concord."

"Ah, my beloved Concord, home also to our dear teacher, the great Mr. Emerson. I will tell you, all bold women of Concord and Boston, all lovers of freedom, about the slavery of the Africans and the slavery of all women today - Hus.h.!.+" She put a finger in the air to stop Helen's next words, and like a silenced child Helen sank back.

"For how can we free the African if we cannot free ourselves? And consider as well our Negro sisters -" This was going a little far, as the sudden intake of breath hissed through the room. "Yes, I say sisters as in G.o.d's eyes we are all brothers and sisters, and if the African man is our brother, so surely the African woman is our sister.

"All depend on our strength, all depend on our action - such as we have already seen, in the anti-slavery committees that have been formed. And when I see the great Abolitionist Miss Sarah Grimke speak, I say - Here is a new woman! She can speak from a pulpit, at the lyceum, in the back of a horse-cart, about the rights of man, and surely I, inspired by her example, can also speak about the rights of women!

"Now think again of our Roman ancestors, and think of their intuitive, their glorious religion - but a precursor to Christian light, yet capable of shedding much light of its own. Philosophy and literature often return to the stories of these G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, these nymphs and heroes, not because they are quaint and foolish stories - no! Because, as with all sincere religions, they held within them certain seeds of truth.

"Consider Minerva - G.o.ddess of Wisdom, daughter of Jove. In antiquity she is often paired with an owl, the symbol of wisdom.

"Minerva represents the woman's own wisdom, the 'masculine' side of the feminine, if you will, without which we would all be as silly as chicks newly hatched. No doubt some of you have daughters about whom you wonder, Is she but a silly chick? ... Are any of them here? Yes?"

A certain amount of t.i.ttering filled the room. Miss Fuller opened her eyes especially wide and landed on a dowager with an elegantly turned-out young woman next to her.

"Oh, madam, I hope you do not wonder about her - She looks as pretty as anything, but I dare say there is wisdom as well...."

The young woman threw her hands before her face and gasped with embarra.s.sed delight.

"And as we need to exercise our wisdom, so do men today need to exercise their nurturance! Why should men not also be allowed to follow their own - if you will - feminine inclinations? I refer to the kindness of the benevolent father, the spiritual softness of the good preacher, the care that the best schoolmaster will take when instructing his charges.

"Perhaps in other ages, in other climes, we would not have such need of our Minerva G.o.ddess to guide us, our own Instructress who carries a wise owl on her shoulder. But today - ladies - we must solicit her to come to us as a dear friend, to guide us. We need leaders.h.i.+p, courage, invention from the women of today! How much you can see if you look about you!"

Accepting her applause, Miss Fuller remained for some moments with her arms stretched wide. Then, with an eager look about her, she asked for questions. Some of the ladies wanted to hear more about Minerva. One had recently visited the Temple of Minerva in Rome, and with effort a few details about its appearance were extracted from her - not so large, the building, as expected - dark inside - the guide not a bit helpful - an owl, or was it a pelican? above the door, she thought - no nose on her, on the Minerva, at all.

Helen made one final effort, pointing out that the Romans owned slaves, so were they to be regarded as offering a beacon of freedom from the past in that respect?

"Ah, my learned friend!" said Miss Fuller. "All societies have their weaknesses. But when we consider that the Roman enslavement of their Greek captives was primarily to employ them as tutors in the house-hold, the picture of slavery is very different from what we suffer here."

"That's not entirely correct," began Helen, but, foolish thing, she was standing in the way of a more robust and better-trained horse than she, and got trampled into the dust quite firmly: "We shall not here quibble about historical detail - we shall save that for another time! And ladies all, may I remind you that with Mr. Wilberforce's heroic leaders.h.i.+p in the English Parliament for many years, in the end of the slave trade and the freeing of the slaves in their West Indies Colonies, we have reason to rejoice and be hopeful about the future of ending slavery here as well!"

Some applause, as the ladies congratulated - they knew not what - themselves? Wilberforce? The freed slaves? The West Indies in general?

"And as the sweep of history pushes ahead to freedom, we will endeavor to act so as to make all men, and women, free!"

As the gathering dispersed, Anne walked over to the windows and looked again into the garden. The terrier was jumping and snapping about the base of a small tree where, just above his reach, the squirrel scolded and bobbed on a branch. The squirrel seemed to have lost its tail, but was otherwise quite alive.

They were still tingling on their ride home in the dark. This time a couple from Fitchburg shared the stagecoach with them. Upon learning of the cause of their companions' excitement, the woman remarked that she couldn't abide public speaking, especially from a female, and closed her eyes. Her husband also pretended to sleep.

Mrs. Deaver was delighted at having shown Miss Fuller to her friends, so pleased that the Wonder had performed her magic again. "Didn't I tell you, she has large ideas, she gives you a sense of the breadth of life!"

Helen said that she was an actress, and said it with scorn, but even she did not deny the beauty. Anne said that Mother did not approve of pagan G.o.ddesses - that Martha and Mary, and perhaps Ruth, certainly Eve, provide metaphors sufficient for daily use.

Helen said, "Mother is old-fas.h.i.+oned about many things, dear. Look how John and Henry cite the cla.s.sical at all times! We must not be restrictive, even as Christians. All metaphors that have use may be invoked - it is the essayist's and speaker's prerogative - and just as the devil may quote scripture, so it seems possible that a lover of human freedom, as we must believe Miss Fuller to be, may pick and choose her talismans from the streets of Imperial Rome -"

Unable to resist, Anne interrupted: "You are talking just like her!"

Helen frowned, but then as quickly her brow cleared, and she laughed along with her sister. "My goodness," she said, "you may be right. And why not? I will condescend to learn. But -" She raised her eyebrows comically.

"We may admire the ancient myths, and the truths they tell - in any case, they are from the Greeks, conquerors and slave-holders themselves. The history of humanity is a sorry story - we must learn from it without making up fairy tales about it."