can I bear to be such a burden upon you?  You trust me, and, I believe,” (she added, colouring), “you love me, twelvefold more than I deserve; yet you think me unwilling or unworthy to take ever so small an interest in your work, to bear a few hours’ discomfort for it and for you.  And yet,” she went on passionately, “I may sit trembling and heart-sick for a whole day alone that you may carry out your purpose.  I may receive the only real sting your lips have given, because I could not bear that pain without crying.  And so with everything.  It is not that I must not suffer pain, but that the pain must not come from without.  Your lips would punish a fault with words that shame and sting for a day, a summer, a year; your hand must never inflict a sting that may smart for ten minutes.  And it is not only that you do this, but you pride yourself on it.  Why?  It is not that you think the pain of the body so much worse than that of the spirit:—­you that smiled at me when you were too badly bruised and torn to stand, yet could scarcely keep back your tears just now, when you thought that I had suffered half an hour of sorrow I did not quite deserve.  Why then?  Do you think that women feel so differently?  Have the women of your Earth hearts so much harder and skins so much softer than ours?”

She spoke with most unusual impetuosity, and with that absolute simplicity and sincerity which marked her every look and word, which gave them, for me at least, an unspeakable charm, and for all who heard her a characteristic individuality unlike the speech or manner of any other woman.  As soon suspect an infant of elaborate sarcasm as Eveena of affectation, irony, or conscious paradox.  Nay, while her voice was in my ears, I never could feel that her views were paradoxical.  The direct straightforwardness and simple structure of the Martial language enhanced this peculiar effect of her speech; and much that seems infantine in translation was all but eloquent as she spoke it.  Often, as on this occasion, I felt guilty of insincerity, of a verbal fencing unworthy of her unalloyed good faith and earnestness, as I endeavoured to parry thrusts that went to the very heart of all those instinctive doctrines which I could the less defend on the moment, because I had never before dreamed that they could be doubted.

“At any rate,” I said at last, “your sex gain by my heresy, since they are as richly gifted in stinging words as we in physical force.”

“So much the worse for them, surely,” she answered simply, “if it be right that men should rule and women obey?”

“That is the received doctrine on Earth,” I answered.  “In practice, men command and women disobey them; men bully and women lie.  But in truth, Eveena, having a wife only too loyal and too loving, I don’t care to canvass the deserts of ordinary women or the discipline of other households.  I own that it was wrong to scold you.  Do not insist on making me say that it would have been a little less wrong to beat you!”