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.

Let me tell you one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for me.
It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years.