“What a dear old house you have!” she said, glancing up at the crossed timbers, projecting gables, and quaint dormer windows set like eyes in the roof—­“I had no idea that it was so pretty!  And the garden is perfectly lovely.  It is so very artistic!—­it looks like a woman’s dream of a garden rather than a man’s.”

John smiled.

“You think women more artistic than men?” he queried.

“In the decorative line—­yes,” she replied—­“Especially where flowers are concerned.  If one leaves the planning of a garden entirely to a man, he is sure to make it too stiff and mathematical,—­he will not allow Nature to have her own way in the least little bit,—­in fact”—­and she laughed—­“I don’t think men as a rule like to let anything or anybody have their own way except themselves!”

The smile still lingered kindly round the corners of Walden’s mouth.

“Possibly you may be right,”—­he said—­“I almost believe you are.  Men are selfish,—­much more selfish than women.  Nature made them so in the first instance,—­and our methods of education and training all tend to intensify our natural bent.  But”—­here he paused and looked at her thoughtfully; “I am not sure that absolute unselfishness would be a wise or strong trait in the character of a man.  You see the first thing he has to do in this world is to earn the right to live,—­and if he were always backing politely out of everybody else’s way, and allowing himself to be hustled to one side in an unselfish desire to let others get to the front, he would scarcely be able to hold his own in any profession.  And all those dependent upon his efforts would also suffer,—­so that his ‘unselfishness’ might become the very worst kind of selfishness in the end—­don’t you think so?” “Well—­yes—­perhaps in that way it might!” hesitated Maryllia, with a faint blush—­“I ought not to judge anyone I know—­but—­oh dear!—­the men one meets in town—­the society men with their insufferable airs of conceit and condescension,—­their dullness of intellect,—­their preference for cigars, whiskey, and Bridge to anything else under the sun,—­their intensely absorbed love of personal ease, and their perfectly absurd confidence in their own supreme wisdom!—­these are the hybrid creatures that make one doubt the worth of the rest of their sex altogether.”

“But there are hybrid creatures on both sides,”—­said Walden quietly—­“Just as there are the men you speak of, so there are women of the same useless and insufferable character.  Is it not so?”

She looked up at him and laughed.

“Why, yes, of course!” she frankly admitted—­“I guess I won’t argue with you on the six of one and half-dozen of the other!  But it’s just as natural for women to criticise men as for men to criticise nowadays.  Long ago, in the lovely ‘once upon a time’ fairy period, the habit of criticism doesn’t appear to have developed strongly in either sex.  The men were chivalrous and tender,—­the women adoring and devoted—­I think it must have been perfectly charming to have lived then!  It is all so different now!”