“And you think woman’s influence—­for you cannot mean anything else—­is somehow taking the vigor out of affairs, making even the church a soft, purring affair, reducing us all to what I suppose you would call a mush of domesticity.”

“Or femininity.”

“Well, the world has been brutal enough; it had better try a little femininity now.”

“I hope it will not be more cruel to women.”

“That is not an argument; that is a stab.  I fancy you are altogether skeptical about woman.  Do you believe in her education?”

“Up to a certain point, or rather, I should say, after a certain point.”

“That’s it,” spoke up my wife, shading her eyes from the fire with a fan.  “I begin to have my doubts about education as a panacea.  I’ve noticed that girls with only a smattering—­and most of them in the nature of things can go, no further—­are more liable to temptations.”

“That is because ‘education’ is mistaken for the giving of information without training, as we are finding out in England,” said Mr. Lyon.

“Or that it is dangerous to awaken the imagination without a heavy ballast of principle,” said Mr. Morgan.

“That is a beautiful sentiment,” Margaret exclaimed, throwing back her head, with a flash from her eyes.  “That ought to shut out women entirely.  Only I cannot see how teaching women what men know is going to give them any less principle than men have.  It has seemed to me a long while that the time has come for treating women like human beings, and giving them the responsibility of their position.”

“And what do you want, Margaret?” I asked.

“I don’t know exactly what I do want,” she answered, sinking back in her chair, sincerity coming to modify her enthusiasm.  “I don’t want to go to Congress, or be a sheriff, or a lawyer, or a locomotive engineer.  I want the freedom of my own being, to be interested in everything in the world, to feel its life as men do.  You don’t know what it is to have an inferior person condescend to you simply because he is a man.”

“Yet you wish to be treated as a woman?” queried Mr. Morgan.

“Of course.  Do you think I want to banish romance out of the world?”

“You are right, my dear,” said my wife.  “The only thing that makes society any better than an industrial ant-hill is the love between women and men, blind and destructive as it often is.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Morgan, rising to go, “having got back to first principles—­”

“You think it is best to take your husband home before he denies even them,” Mr. Morgan added.

When the others had gone, Margaret sat by the fire, musing, as if no one else were in the room.  The Englishman, still alert and eager for information, regarded her with growing interest.  It came into my mind as odd that, being such an uninteresting people as we are, the English should be so curious about us.  After an interval, Mr. Lyon said: