Decidedly, his views were moderate.  From the beginning he allowed it to be understood that, whatever might be the effect of long hair, he for one considered it becoming, and was by no means in favour of reducing it to the male type.  The young lady of Stockholm might or might not have been indebted for her wider mental scope to the practice of curtailing her locks, yet he had known many Swedish ladies (and ladies of England, too) who, in spite of lovely hair, managed to preserve an exquisite sense of the distinctions of womanhood, and this (advanced opinion notwithstanding) he maintained was the principal thing.  But, the fact that so many women were nowadays lifting up their voices in a demand for various degrees of emancipation seemed to show that the long tresses and the flowing garb had really, by process of civilization, come to symbolize certain traditions of inferiority which weighed upon the general female consciousness.  “Let us, then, ask what these traditions are, and what is to be said for or against them from the standpoint of a liberal age.”

Denzil no longer looked with horror at the face of the clock; his only fear was lest the hands should move too rapidly, and forbid him to utter in spacious periods all he had on his mind.  By half-past eight he was in the midst of a vehement plea for an enlargement of female education, in the course of which he uttered several things rather disturbing to the nerves of Mrs. Mumbray, and other ladies present.—­Woman, it was true, lived an imperfect life if she did not become wife and mother; but this truism had been insisted on to the exclusion of another verity quite as important:  that wifehood and motherhood, among civilized people, implied qualifications beyond the physical.  The ordinary girl was sent forth into life with a mind scarcely more developed than that of a child.  Hence those monstrous errors she constantly committed when called upon to accept a husband.  Not one marriage in fifty thousand was an alliance on terms fair to the woman.  In the vast majority of cases, she wedded a sort of man in the moon.  Of him and of his world she knew nothing; whereas the bridegroom had almost always a very sufficient acquaintance with the circumstances, habits, antecedents, characteristics, of the girl he espoused.  Her parents, her guardians, should assure themselves—­pooh! even if these people were conscientious and capable, the task was in most cases beyond their power.

“I have no scheme for rendering marriages universally happy.  On the contrary, I believe that marriages in general will always serve as a test of human patience.” (Outbreak of masculine laughter.) “But assuredly it is possible, by judicious training of young girls, to guard them against some of the worst perils which now threaten their going forth into the world.  It is possible to put them on something like an equality in knowledge of life with the young men of corresponding social station.” ("Oh, shameful!” murmured