’Reorganiser sans Dieu ni roi,
Par le culte systematique
de l’Humanite.’”

“Oh, Peyton! what fearfully, selfishly long sentences you and Douglass inflict upon each other, and upon me!  The colons and semicolons gather along the lines of conversation like an army of martyrs, and to my stupidly weary ears that last, that final period, was a most ’sweet boon’—­a crowning blessing.  If Regina’s nightingale soul is to be vexed by such disquisitions as those from which you have been quoting, I must say it made a sorry bargain in exchanging brown feathers for pink flesh, and would have had a better time trilling madrigals in some hawthorn thicket or myrtle grove.  I see plainly I might as well carry my dear old Evelyn—­fragrant with mint and marjoram—­back upstairs, and wrap it up in ancient camphor-scented linen, and put it away tenderly to sleep its last sleep in the venerable cedar chest, where my grandfather’s huge knee-buckles, and my great-grandmother’s yellow brocaded silk-dress, with its waist the length of my little finger, and the sleeves as wide as a balloon.  Gentlemen, permit me one parting paragraph, before I write ‘finis’ on this matter of education, and ’hereafter for ever hold my peace.’  Be it distinctly understood, ’by these presents,’ that if that child Regina grows up a blue-stocking, or a metempsychosist, a scientist or a freedom-shrieker, a professor of physics or a practitioner of physic, judge of a court or mayor of a city, biologist, sociologist, heathen or heretic, it will be no work or wish of mine; for to each and all of these threatened, progressive abominations, I, Elise Lindsay, do hold up clean hands, and cry, Avaunt!”

“I thought my sister had long since learned that borrowing trouble necessitated the payment of usurious interest?  Just now our little girl carries no gorgon’s head; let her alone.  The most imperatively demanded change in our system of female training, is the addition of a few years in which to work.  American girls are turned out upon society when they should be beginning their apprenticeship under their mothers’ eyes in all household arts and sciences; and they are wives and mothers before they are able physically, mentally, or morally to appreciate the sacred, solemn responsibilities that inhere in such positions.  If our girls pursued methodically all the branches of a liberal and classical education, including domestic economy, until they were at least twenty, how much misery would be averted! how many more really elegant interesting women would be added to the charm of society, usefulness to country, happiness and sanctity of home!  Had I means to bestow in such enterprises, I should like to endow some institution, and stipulate for a chair of household-arts-and-sciences-and-home-duties; and Regina should not go into general society until she had graduated therein.”