severely wounded; but I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.’
She was all her lifetime the victim of disease and
pain. She read and wrote in bed, and believed that
she could understand anything better when she was
ill. Pain acted like a girdle, to give tension to her
powers. A lady, who was with her one day during a
terrible attack of nervous headache, which made
Margaret totally helpless, assured me that Margaret was yet
in the finest vein of humor, and kept those who were
assisting her in a strange, painful excitement, between
laughing and crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies.
There were other peculiarities of habit and power.
When she turned her head on one side, she alleged she
had second sight, like St. Francis. These traits or
predispositions made her a willing listener to all the
uncertain science of mesmerism and its goblin brood,
which have been rife in recent years.
She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of herself, ‘A man’s ambition with a woman’s heart, is an evil lot.’ In some verses which she wrote ‘To the Moon,’ occur these lines: —
‘But if steadfast gaze upon thy face,
A human secret, like my own, I trace;
For, through the woman’s smile looks the male eye.’
And she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of Balzac’s, “Le Livre Mystique,” in which an equivocal figure exerts alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of the plot.
Of all this nocturnal element in her nature she was very conscious, and was disposed, of course, to give it
