She shall rise a woman at last

Of some of the places into which Falconer led me that night I will attempt no description -- places flashing with lights and mirrors, crowded with dancers, billowing with music, close and hot, and full of the saddest of all sights, the superficial faces of cheapened women.

'There is a passion,' I said, as we came out of one of these dreadful places, 'that lingers about the heart like the odor of violets, like a glimmering twilight on the borders of moonrise; and there is a passion that wraps itself in the vapors of patchouli and coffins, and streams from the eyes like gaslight from a tavern. And yet the line is ill to draw between them. It is very dreadful. These are women.'

'They are in God's hands,' answered Falconer. 'He hasn't done with them yet. Shall it take less time to make a woman than to make a world? Is not the woman the greater? She may have her ages of chaos, her centuries of crawling slime, yet rise a woman at last.'

Selah.

-- George MacDonald, "My Own Acquaintance," Robert Falconer.