e than it has been."

"I'm not sure of that. Robustness is needed in churches as much as in
government. I don't know how much the cause of religion is advanced
by these church clubs of Christian Endeavor if that is the name,
associations of young boys and girls who go about visiting other like
clubs in a sufficiently hilarious manner. I suppose it's the spirit of
the age. I'm just wondering whether the world is getting to think more
of having a good time than it is of salvation."

"And you think woman's influence--for you cannot mean anything else--is
somehow taking the vigor out of affairs, making even the church a soft,
purring affair, reducing us all to what I suppose you would call a mush
of domesticity."

"Or femininity."

"Well, the world has been brutal enough; it had better try a little
femininity now."

"I hope it will not be more cruel to women."

"That is not an argument; that is a stab. I fancy you are altogether
skeptical about woman. Do you believe in her education?"

"Up to a certain point, or rather, I should say, after a certain point."

"That's it," spoke up my wife, shading her eyes from the fire with
a fan. "I begin to have my doubts about education as a panacea. I've
noticed that girls with only a smattering--and most of them in the
nature of things can go, no further--are more liable to temptations."

"That is because 'education' is mistaken for the giving of information
without training, as we are finding out in England," said Mr. Lyon.

"Or that it is dangerous to awaken the imagination without a heavy
ballast of principle," said Mr. Morgan.

"That is a beautiful sentiment," Margaret exclaimed, throwing back
her head, with a flash from her eyes. "That ought to shut out women
entirely. Only I cannot see how teaching women what men know is going to
give them any less principle than men have. It has seemed to me a long
while that the time has come for treating women like human beings, and
giving them the responsibility of their position."

"And what do you want, Margaret?" I asked.

"I don't know exactly what I do want," she answered, sinking back in her
chair, sincerity coming to modify her enthusiasm. "I don't want to go to
Congress, or be a sheriff, or a lawyer, or a locomotive engineer. I
want the freedom of my own being, to be interested in everything in the
world, to feel its life as men do. You don't know what it is to have an
inferior person condescend to you simply because he