“Roberts!  Faugh, he had nothing to do with it.  Aunt Mary selected them all herself.  They are the latest and newest from Paris—­almost direct.”

“Does that make them better?”

“Well, I don’t know that there is anything in their coming from Paris, except that one likes to know that they come from the beginning-place of such things.  Now if they had been made in Boston, New York, or Baltimore, one would not be certain they were like the right thing; and now we know they are the real thing itself.  Do you understand?”

“Oh, yes—­as well as a man may; and it is quite well put, too, and I don’t know that I ever had so clear an idea of the value of things from a distance before.”

“Well, you see, when a thing comes clear from the farthest off, we know there ain’t anything beyond; and when it comes from the beginning, we don’t take it second hand.”

“I see; but why do you care, you girls in this far-off, rude region?”

“Mamma, do you hear that?  Here is my own especial father, and your husband, asking me, a woman, and a very young woman too, for a reason.”

“It is because you are a very young one that he expects you to give a reason.  Perhaps he thinks you will not claim the privilege of our sex.”

“Well, I won’t.  Now, then, Papa Judge, this is not a far-off, rude region, and you see that the French ladies want these styles and fashions, and all that; well, if they want them, we want them too.”

“Now I don’t quite see.  How do you know they want them?  Perhaps they are sent here because they don’t want them; and, besides, why should a backwoods girl in Ohio want what a high-born lady in the French capital wants?”

“Because the American girl is a woman; and, besides, the court must hear and decide, and not ask absurd questions.”

“And who is to see you in French millinery, here in the woods?”

“Oh, bless its foolish man’s heart, that thinks a woman dresses to please its taste, when it hasn’t any!  We dress to please ourselves and plague each other—­don’t you know that? and we ain’t pleased with poky home-made things.”

“Julia!  Mother,” appealed the Judge, with uplifted hands, to Mrs. Markham, “where did this young lady get her notions?”

“From the common source of woman’s notions, as you call them, I presume—­her feelings and fancies; and she is merely letting you see the workings of a woman’s mind.  We should all betray our sex a hundred times a day, if our blessed husbands and fathers had the power to understand us, I fear.”

“And don’t we understand you?”

“Of course you do, as well as you ever will.  My dear husband, don’t you also understand that if you fully comprehended us, or we you, we should lose interest in each other? that now we may be a perpetual revelation and study to each other, and so never become worn and common?”

“There, Papa Judge, are you satisfied—­not with our arguments, but with us?”