THE FUTURE LADY PETERBOROUGH

’If you have not sold yourself for British gold, and for British acres, and for British rank, I have nothing to say against it,’ said Miss Wallachia Petrie that same evening to her friend Caroline Spalding.

‘You know that I have not sold myself, as you call it,’ said Caroline.  There had been a long friendship between these two ladies, and the younger one knew that it behoved her to bear a good deal from the elder.  Miss Petrie was honest, clever, and in earnest.  We in England are not usually favourably disposed to women who take a pride in a certain antagonism to men in general, and who are anxious to shew the world that they can get on very well without male assistance; but there are many such in America who have noble aspirations, good intellects, much energy, and who are by no means unworthy of friendship.  The hope in regard to all such women—­the hope entertained not by themselves, but by those who are solicitous for them—­is that they will be cured at last by a husband and half-a-dozen children.  In regard to Wallachia Petrie there was not, perhaps, much ground for such hope.  She was so positively wedded to women’s rights in general, and to her own rights in particular, that it was improbable that she should ever succumb to any man, and where would be the man brave enough to make the effort?  From circumstances Caroline Spalding had been the beloved of her heart since Caroline Spalding was a very little girl; and she had hoped that Caroline would through life have borne arms along with her in that contest which she was determined to wage against man, and which she always waged with the greatest animosity against men of the British race.  She hated rank; she hated riches; she hated monarchy and with a true woman’s instinct in battle, felt that she had a specially strong point against Englishmen, in that they submitted themselves to dominion from a woman monarch.

And now the chosen friend of her youth, the friend who had copied out all her poetry, who had learned by heart all her sonnets, who had, as she thought, reciprocated all her ideas, was going to be married and to be married to an English lord!  She had seen that it was coming for some time, and had spoken out very plainly, hoping that she might still save the brand from the burning.  Now the evil was done; and Caroline Spalding, when she told her news, knew well that she would have to bear some heavy reproaches.

’How many of us are there who never know whether we sell ourselves or not?’ said Wallachia.  ’The senator who longs for office, and who votes this way instead of that in order that he may get it, thinks that he is voting honestly.  The minister who calls himself a teacher of God’s word, thinks that it is God’s word that he preaches when he strains his lungs to fill his church.  The question is this, Caroline would you have loved the same man had he come to you with a woodman’s axe in his hand or a clerk’s quill behind his ear?  I guess not.’