“All right, aunt.”

“These are our neighbors, the Misses Williams.  Perhaps they will have some stout.  You might bring in a couple of bottles, Charles.”

“No, no, thank you!  None for us!” cried her two visitors, earnestly.

“No?  I am sorry that I have no tea to offer you.  I look upon the subserviency of woman as largely due to her abandoning nutritious drinks and invigorating exercises to the male.  I do neither.”  She picked up a pair of fifteen-pound dumb-bells from beside the fireplace and swung them lightly about her head.  “You see what may be done on stout,” said she.

“But don’t you think,” the elder Miss Williams suggested timidly, “don’t you think, Mrs. Westmascott, that woman has a mission of her own?”

The lady of the house dropped her dumb-bells with a crash upon the floor.

“The old cant!” she cried.  “The old shibboleth!  What is this mission which is reserved for woman?  All that is humble, that is mean, that is soul-killing, that is so contemptible and so ill-paid that none other will touch it.  All that is woman’s mission.  And who imposed these limitations upon her?  Who cooped her up within this narrow sphere?  Was it Providence?  Was it nature?  No, it was the arch enemy.  It was man.”

“Oh, I say, auntie!” drawled her nephew.

“It was man, Charles.  It was you and your fellows I say that woman is a colossal monument to the selfishness of man.  What is all this boasted chivalry—­these fine words and vague phrases?  Where is it when we wish to put it to the test?  Man in the abstract will do anything to help a woman.  Of course.  How does it work when his pocket is touched?  Where is his chivalry then?  Will the doctors help her to qualify? will the lawyers help her to be called to the bar? will the clergy tolerate her in the Church?  Oh, it is close your ranks then and refer poor woman to her mission!  Her mission!  To be thankful for coppers and not to interfere with the men while they grabble for gold, like swine round a trough, that is man’s reading of the mission of women.  You may sit there and sneer, Charles, while you look upon your victim, but you know that it is truth, every word of it.”

Terrified as they were by this sudden torrent of words, the two gentlewomen could not but smile at the sight of the fiery, domineering victim and the big apologetic representative of mankind who sat meekly bearing all the sins of his sex.  The lady struck a match, whipped a cigarette from a case upon the mantelpiece, and began to draw the smoke into her lungs.

“I find it very soothing when my nerves are at all ruffled,” she explained.  “You don’t smoke?  Ah, you miss one of the purest of pleasures—­one of the few pleasures which are without a reaction.”

Miss Williams smoothed out her silken lap.

“It is a pleasure,” she said, with some approach to self-assertion, “which Bertha and I are rather too old-fashioned to enjoy.”