world-trodden

Updated: May 7, 2025

She, too, called a woman, who leads society, and triumphs over caste and custom with metallic ring and force, she who forgets the decencies of age in her shameless attire, and supplies its defects with subterfuges, falser in heart even than in aspect, she, about whom cluster men old and young, applauding with brays of laughter and coarser jeers the rancor of her wit, as it drops its laughing venom or its sneering sophisms of worldly wisdom, even she, when the lights are fled, when the music has ceased from its own desecration, when the frenzy of wine and laughter mock her in their dead dregs, when the men who flattered and the women who envied are all gone, she recalls one calm eye in the crowd, that stung her with its pure contemptuous pity, a look not to be shut out with draperies as the stars are; and even through her soul, harder than the soul of that unowned sister walking the midnight street beneath the window, since it has ceased to know the stab of sin or the choking agony of shame, even through that world-trodden heart flashes one conscious pang, one glimpse of a possible heaven and an inevitable hell, one naked and open vision of herself.

Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 32, June, 1860