The Cause needed a woman's
help, a woman's enthusiasm. Without considering my motherless condition,
my helplessness, the immaturity of my mind, he drew me day by day into
the secret meshes of his great scheme, a scheme which, as I failed to
understand till it had absorbed me, meant the unequivocal devotion of my
whole life to the exclusion of every other hope or purpose. Favored, he
called it, favored to stand for liberty, the advancement of men, the
right of every human being to an untrammeled existence. And favored I
thought myself, till one awful day when my brother, coming suddenly into
my room, found me making plans for an innocent pleasure and told me such
things were no longer for me, that a great and immortal duty awaited me,
one that had come sooner than he expected, but which my youth, beauty,
and spirit eminently fitted me to carry on to triumph.
"I was frightened. For the first time in my memory of him he looked like
his Italian father, the man we had all tried to forget. Once while
rummaging amongst my mother's treasures I had come across a miniature of
Signor Toritti. He was a handsome man but there was something terrible in
his eye; something to make the ordinary heart stand still. Alfred's
burned with the same meaning at this moment, and as I noted his manner,
which was elevated, almost godlike, I realized the difference in our
heredity and how natural to him were the sacrifices for which my mind and
temper were as naturally unprepared.
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