Chapter 15: The Supplicant

There was in the house that night one person who did not attempt to sleep--its mistress, Mrs. Miriam Powell, a woman of character; a fact which was sufficiently demonstrated by the name by which she was best known to the world. For when the Christian name of a married woman is familiar to the public it is because she is a person of marked individuality.

Something of her history was notorious; not only within a large circle of acquaintance, but outside of it. It had lost nothing in the telling. An unhappy marriage; a loose-living husband--a man who was in more senses than one unclean; a final resolution on her part to live out her life alone. Out of these data she had evolved a set of opinions on sexual questions to which she endeavoured to induce anyone and everyone, in season and out of season, to listen. There were some who regarded her with sympathy, some with admiration, some with respect, and some with fatigue.

In such cases women are apt to be regarded as representatives of a class; as abstractions, not concrete facts. The accident of her having had a bad husband was known to all the world; that she was herself the victim of a temperament was not. She was of the stuff out of which saints and martyrs may have been made, which is not necessarily good material out of which to make a wife. Enthusiasm was a necessity of her existence--not the frothy, fleeting frenzy of a foolish female, but an enduring possession of the kind which makes nothing of fighting with beasts at Ephesus. Although she herself might not be aware of it, the nature of her matrimonial experiences had given her what her instincts craved for: a creed--sexual reform.

She maintained that sexual intercourse was a thing of horror; the cause of all the evil which the world contains. Although she was wise enough not to proclaim the fact, in her heart she was of opinion that it would be better that the race should die out rather than that the evil should continue. She aimed at what she called universal chastity; maintaining that the less men and women had to do with each other the better. In pursuit of this chimera she performed labours which, if not worthy of Hercules, at least resembled those of Sisyphus in that they had to be done over and over again. The stone would not stay at the top of the hill.