“‘Lay on, Macduff!’ I wish you distinctly to understand that my toes are not bruised in the slightest degree; for I am entirely innocent of any attempt at erudition or authorship, and the sole literary dream of my life is to improve the present popular recipe for biscuit glace.  But mark you, ‘Sir Oracle,’ I must ‘ope my lips’ and bark a little under my breath at your inconsistencies.  Now, if there are two living men whom, above all others, you swear by, they are John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin.  Well do I recollect your eulogy of both, on that ever-memorable day in Paris, when we dined with that French encyclopaedia, Count W—­, and the leading lettered men of the day were discussed.  I was frightened out of my wits, and dared not raise my eyes higher than the top of my wineglass, lest I should be asked my opinion of some book or subject of which I had never even heard, and in trying to appear well-educated, make as horrible a blunder as poor Madame Talleyrand committed, when she talked to Denon about his man Friday, believing that he wrote ’Robinson Crusoe.’  At that time I had never read either Mill or Ruskin; but my profound reverence for the wisdom of your opinions taught me how shamefully ignorant I was, and thus, to fit myself for your companionship, I immediately bought their books.  Lo, to my indescribable amazement, I found that Mill claimed for women what I never once dreamed we were worthy of—­not only equality, but the right of suffrage.  He, the foremost dialectician of England and the most learned of political economists, demands that, for the sake of equity and ‘social improvement,’ we women (minus the required six ounces of brains) should be allowed to vote.  Behold the Corypheus of the ‘woman’s rights’ school!  Were I to follow his teachings, I should certainly begin to clamor for my right of suffrage—­for the lady-like privilege of elbowing you away from the ballot-box at the next election.

“I am quite as far from admitting the infallibility of man as the equality of the sexes.  The clearest thinkers of the world have had soft spots in their brains; for instance, the daemon belief of Socrates and the ludicrous superstitions of Pythagoras; and you have laid your finger on the softened spot in Mill’s skull, ‘suffrage.’  That is a jaded, spavined hobby of his, and he is too shrewd a logician to involve himself in the inconsistency of ’extended suffrage’ which excludes women.  When I read his ’Representative Government’ I saw that his reason had dragged anchor, the prestige of his great name vanished, and I threw the book into the fire and eschewed him henceforth.  Sic transit.”

Here Mrs. Murray looked up and said: 

“John Stuart Mill—­let me see—­Edna, is he not the man who wrote that touching dedication of one of his books to his wife’s memory?  You quoted it for me a few days ago, and said that you had committed it to memory because it was such a glowing tribute to the intellectual capacity of woman.  My dear, I wish you would repeat it now!  I should like to hear it again.”