The contemplation of their treatment, especially
by the guilty authors of their ruin, moved her to a calm and
mournful indignation, which she did not attempt to suppress
nor control. Others were willing to pity and deplore; Margaret
was more inclined to vindicate and to redeem. She did not
hesitate to avow that on meeting some of these abused, unhappy
sisters, she had been surprised to find them scarcely fallen
morally below the ordinary standard of Womanhood,--realizing
and loathing their debasement; anxious to escape it; and only
repelled by the sad consciousness that for them sympathy and
society remained only so long as they should persist in
the ways of pollution. Those who have read her 'Woman,' may
remember some daring comparisons therein suggested between
these Pariahs of society and large classes of their
respectable sisters; and that was no fitful expression,--no
sudden outbreak,--but impelled by her most deliberate
convictions. I think, if she had been born to large fortune, a
house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to
the ways of Virtue, would have been one of her most cherished
and first realized conceptions.
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