When they returned to the inn, Mrs. Mavick began to rally Philip about his feminine taste in woodsy things.  He would gladly have thrown botany or anything else overboard to win the good opinion of Evelyn’s mother, but botany now had a real significance and a new meaning for him.  Therefore he put in a defense, by saying: 

“Botany, in the hands of Miss McDonald, cannot be called very feminine; it is a good deal more difficult to understand and master than law.”

“Maybe that’s the reason,” said Mrs. Mavick, “why so many more girls are eager to study law now than botany.”

“Law?” cried Evelyn; “and to practice?”

“Certainly.  Don’t you think that a bright, clever woman, especially if she were pretty, would have an advantage with judge and jury?”

“Not if judge and jury were women,” Miss McDonald interposed.

“And you remember Portia?” Mrs. Mavick continued.

“Portia,” said Evelyn; “yes, but that is poetry; and, McDonald, wasn’t it a kind of catch?  How beautifully she talked about mercy, but she turned the sharp edge of it towards the Jew.  I didn’t like that.”

“Yes,” Miss McDonald replied, “it was a kind of trick, a poet’s law.  What do you say, Mr. Burnett?”

“Why,” said Philip, hesitating, “usually it is understood when a man buys or wins anything that the appurtenances necessary to give him full possession go with it.  Only in this case another law against the Jew was understood.  It was very clever, nothing short of woman’s wit.”

“Are there any women in your firm, Mr. Burnett?” asked Mrs. Mavick.

“Not yet, but I think there are plenty of lawyers who would be willing to take Portia for a partner.”

“Make her what you call a consulting partner.  That is just the way with you men—­as soon as you see women succeeding in doing anything independently, you head them off by matrimony.”

“Not against their wills,” said the governess, with some decision.

“Oh, the poor things are easily hypnotized.  And I’m glad they are.  The funniest thing is to hear the Woman’s Rights women talk of it as a state of subjection,” and Mrs. Mavick laughed out of her deep experience.

“Rights, what’s that?” asked Evelyn.

“Well, child, your education has been neglected.  Thank McDonald for that.”

“Don’t you know, Evelyn,” the governess explained, “that we have always said that women had a right to have any employment, or do anything they were fitted to do?”

“Oh, that, of course; I thought everybody said that.  That is natural.  But I mean all this fuss.  I guess I don’t understand what you all are talking about.”  And her bright face broke out of its look of perplexity into a smile.

“Why, poor thing,” said her mother, “you belong to the down-trodden sex.  Only you haven’t found it out.”

“But, mamma,” and the girl seemed to be turning the thing over in her mind, as was her wont with any new proposition, “there seem to be in history a good many women who never found it out either.”