“I can tell you, Mr. Lyon,” my wife interrupted, “you will get no information out of Mr. Morgan; he is a scoffer.”

“Not at all, I do assure you,” Morgan replied.  “I am just a humble observer.  I see that there is a change going on, but I cannot comprehend it.  When I was young, girls used to go in for society; they danced their feet off from seventeen to twenty-one.  I never heard anything about any occupation; they had their swing and their fling, and their flirtations; they appeared to be skimming off of those impressionable, joyous years the cream of life.”

“And you think that fitted them for the seriousness of life?” asked his wife.

“Well, I am under the impression that very good women came out of that society.  I got one out of that dancing crowd who has been serious enough for me.”

“And little enough you have profited by it,” said Mrs. Morgan.

“I’m content.  But probably I’m old-fashioned.  There is quite another spirit now.  Girls out of pinafores must begin seriously to consider some calling.  All their flirtation from seventeen to twenty-one is with some occupation.  All their dancing days they must go to college, or in some way lay the foundation for a useful life.  I suppose it’s all right.  No doubt we shall have a much higher style of women in the future than we ever had in the past.”

“You allow nothing,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “for the necessity of earning a living in these days of competition.  Women never will come to their proper position in the world, even as companions of men, which you regard as their highest office, until they have the ability to be self-supporting.”

“Oh, I admitted the fact of the independence of women a long time ago.  Every one does that before he comes to middle life.  About the shifting all round of this burden of earning a living, I am not so sure.  It does not appear yet to make competition any less; perhaps competition would disappear if everybody did earn his own living and no more.  I wonder, by-the-way, if the girls, the young women, of the class we seem to be discussing ever do earn as much as would pay the wages of the servants who are hired to do the housework in their places?”

“That is a most ignoble suggestion,” I could not help saying, “when you know that the object in modern life is the cultivation of the mind, the elevation of women, and men also, in intellectual life.”

“I suppose so.  I should like to have asked Abigail Adams’s opinion on the way to do it.”

“One would think,” I said, “that you didn’t know that the spinning-jenny and the stocking-knitter had been invented.  Given these, the women’s college was a matter of course.”

“Oh, I’m a believer in all kinds of machinery anything to save labor.  Only, I have faith that neither the jenny nor the college will change human nature, nor take the romance out of life.”

“So have I,” said my wife.  “I’ve heard two things affirmed:  that women who receive a scientific or professional education lose their faith, become usually agnostics, having lost sensitiveness to the mysteries of life.”