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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894

"Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works"


Philip, my boy, do you know I am the sort of man that locks his door
sometimes and cries his heart out of his eyes,--that can sob like a woman
and not be ashamed of it? I come of fighting-blood on one side, you
know; I think I could be savage on occasion. But I am tender,--more and
more tender as I come into my fulness of manhood. I don't like to strike
a man, (laugh, if you like,--I know I hit hard when I do strike,)--but
what I can't stand is the sight of these poor, patient, toiling women,
who never find out in this life how good they are, and never know what it
is to be told they are angels while they still wear the pleasing
incumbrances of humanity. I don't know what to make of these cases. To
think that a woman is never to be a woman again, whatever she may come to
as an unsexed angel,--and that she should die unloved! Why does not
somebody come and carry off this noble woman, waiting here all ready to
make a man happy? Philip, do you know the pathos there is in the eyes of
unsought women, oppressed with the burden of an inner life unshared? I
can see into them now as I could not in those 'earlier days.


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