“I understand,” said Wander, his eyes glowing.

“In the world of thought it is the same.”

“Verily.”

“But I speak for women—­and I am afraid that you’ll not understand.”

“I should like to be given a chance to try,” he answered.

“Clarinda,” she said, after a moment’s pause, “like the larger part of the world, is looking at a mirage.  She sees these shining pictures on the hot sand of the world and she says:  ’These are the real things.  I will fix my gaze on them.  What does the hot sand and the trackless waste matter so long as I have these beautiful mirages to look at?’ When you say that mirages are insubstantial, evanishing, mere tricks of air and eye, the Clarindas retort, ’But if you take away our mirages, where are we to turn?  What will you give us in the place of them?’ She thinks, for example, if a dying soldier calls on his mother or his sweetheart that they must be good women.  This is not the case.  He calls on them because confronts the great loneliness of death.  He is quite as likely to call on a wicked woman if she is the one whose name comes to his flickering sense.  But even supposing that one had to be sacrificial, subservient, and to possess all the other Clarinda virtues in order to have a dying man call on one, still, would that burst of delirious wistfulness compensate one for years of servitude?”

She let the statement hang in the air for a moment, while Wander’s color deepened yet more.  He was being wounded in the place of his dreams and the pang was sharp.

“If some one, dying, called you ‘Faithful slave,’” resumed Kate, “would that make you proud?  Would it not rather be a humiliation?  Now, ’good wife’ might be synonymous with ‘faithful slave.’  That’s what I’d have to ascertain before I could be complimented as Clarinda was complimented by those words.  I’d have to have my own approval.  No one else could comfort me with a ‘well done’ unless my own conscience echoed the words.  ’Good wife,’ indeed!”

“What would reconcile you to such commendations?” asked Wander with a reproach that was almost personal.

“The possession of those privileges and mediums by which liberty is sustained.”

“For example?”

“My own independent powers of thought; my own religion, politics, taste, and direction of self-development—­above all, my own money.  By that I mean money for which I did not have to ask and which never was given to me as an indulgence.  Then I should want definite work commensurate with my powers; and the right to a voice in all matters affecting my life or the life of my family.”

“That is what you would take.  But what would you give?”

“I would not ‘take’ these things any more than my husband would ‘take’ them.  Nor could he bestow them upon me, for they are mine by inherent right.”

“Could he give you nothing, then?”