Hollingsworth Zenobia Priscilla

It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote
ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If
the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty
certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch
a second glance. Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under our
microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations,
magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of
course patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then,
should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after
all,--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real
personage,--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.

Thus, as my conscience has often whispered me, I did Hollingsworth a
great wrong by prying into his character; and am perhaps doing him as
great a one, at this moment, by putting faith in the discoveries which
I seemed to make. But I could not help it. Had I loved him less, I
might have used him better. He and Zenobia and Priscilla--both for
their own sakes and as connected with him--were separated from the rest
of the Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of
a problem which it was my business to solve.

Other associates had a
portion of my time; other matters amused me; passing occurrences
carried me along with them, while they lasted. But here was the vortex
of my meditations, around which they revolved, and whitherward they too
continually tended. In the midst of cheerful society, I had often a
feeling of loneliness. For it was impossible not to be sensible that,
while these three characters figured so largely on my private theatre,
I--though probably reckoned as a friend by all--was at best but a
secondary or tertiary personage with either of them.