Do as you like. But here is that terrible fact to begin with,--a
beautiful young girl, with the blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to
Nature's women, turned loose among live men.
-Terrible fact?
Very terrible. Nothing more so. Do you forget the angels who lost
heaven for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women
who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If
jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if pangs that
waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping
melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities,
then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.--I
love to look at this "Rainbow," as her father used sometimes to call her,
of ours. Handsome creature that she is in forms and colors,--the very
picture, as it seems to me, of that "golden blonde" my friend whose book
you read last year fell in love with when he was a boy, (as you remember,
no doubt,)--handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her
beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her.
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