On expressing surprise at such a singular
exhibition of taste, I received this innocent, unpremeditated
reply:--"Why, I don't like them; the sight of them almost freezes my
blood; but--somehow I do like to look at them, _for I always feel better
after it_!" Now is there not involved in this artless answer a possible
explanation of the above-mentioned fact? Has not woman, hidden somewhere
among her other (of course angelic)--affections, a positive _love_ of
sickness, death, sorrow, and suffering, which man does not possess? Is
not the pain they cause, in her case, qualified by actual pleasure?
Do they not act as a stimulus upon her sensitive nervous system, and
produce, somehow, a _delightfully intoxicated state of the feelings_?
Would not this explain her otherwise unaccountable fondness for
witnessing the execution of murderers, for the horrible in novels
and the deaths and catastrophes in the newspapers, that she has a
constitutional relish for such horrid things, and that she enjoys them,
not because they are _in se_ productive of pleasure, but just, as is the
case with her "crying," _because she feels better after it_? And I think
it would be found, if an investigation of the subject were instituted,
that a foreknowledge of this inevitable result, derived from intuition
or experience, is the agent which breaks up the clouds of her sorrow:
so that, while the grief of a man stricken down by misfortune is an
equinoctial storm, dark and dismal, which lasts for weeks and months,
the grief of woman is a succession of refreshing April showers, each of
brief duration, and the spaces between them filled with sunshine and
rainbows.
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