Chapman!"
"Jezebel," etc.--were employed in these letters.
Many of them were written by female hands or in very delicate male
chirography, as if men who wrote like women had their natures.
There was one woman's handwriting the girls learned to identify, and she
wrote more often than any--more beautifully in the writing, more
shameless in the meaning, as if, with the nethermost experience in
sensuality, she was prepared to subtleize it and be the universal
accuser of her sex.
"What fiends must surround us!" exclaimed Agnes. "There must be a
punishment deeper than any for the writers of anonymous letters. A
murderer strikes the vital spot but once. Here every commandment is
broken in the cowardly secret letter. False witness, the stab, illicit
joy, covetousness, dishonor of father and mother, and defamation of
God's image in the heart, are all committed in these loathsome letters."
"Yes," added Podge Byerly, "the woman who writes anonymous letters, I
think, will have a cancer, or wart on her eye, or marry a bow-legged
man. The resurrectionists will get her body, and the primary class in
the other world will play whip-top with the rest of her."
Agnes and Podge went to church prayer-meeting the night following Calvin
Van de Lear's repulse at their dwelling, and Mr.
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