“Oh, that’s abnormal, almost perverted,” said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.  “The women’s courts are places where no—­” he hesitated a bare instant, and Mrs. Wayne asked: 

“No woman should go?”

“No girl should go.”

“Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen.”

Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.

“Ah, dear lady,” he said, “you must forgive my saying that that remark is a trifle irrelevant.”

“Is it?” she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying: 

“Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rushing into things they don’t understand, and of course we all know what women are—­”

“What are they?” asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley’s heart sank.

“Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful.”

“Mrs. Baxter, I’m sure you’re not like that.”

“My dear Madam!” exclaimed Wilsey.

“But isn’t that logical?” Mrs. Wayne pursued.  “If all women are so, and she’s a woman?”

“Ah, logic, dear lady,” said Wilsey, holding up a finger—­“logic, you know, has never been the specialty of your sex.”

“Of course it’s logic,” said Lanley, crossly.  “If you say all Americans are liars, Wilsey, and you’re an American, the logical inference is that you think yourself a liar.  But Mrs. Baxter doesn’t mean that she thinks all women are inferior—­”

“I must say I prefer men,” she answered almost coquettishly.

“If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I’d believe in giving them the vote,” said Wilsey.

“Please don’t,” she answered.  “I don’t want it.”

“Ah, the clever ones don’t.”

“I never pretended to be clever.”

“Perhaps not; but I’d trust your intuition where I would pay no attention to a clever person.”

Lanley laughed.

“I think you’d better express that a little differently, Wilsey,” he said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.

“My daughter came to me the other day,” he went on to Mrs. Baxter, “and said, ‘Father, don’t you think women ought to have the vote some day?’ and I said, ‘Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.’”

“There’s no answer to that,” said Mrs. Baxter.

“I fancy not,” said Wilsey.  “I think I put the essence of it in that sentence.”

“If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad.”

“O Mrs. Baxter,” said Mrs. Wayne, “really you don’t understand women—­”

“I don’t?  Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman.”

“All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you said; but that isn’t all they are.  The women I see, the wives of my poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient.  They are mothers and wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they’re not the sort of women you describe.  Perhaps,” she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward concession, “perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as you say—­”