to quote them, I'm afraid. I suppose you'd hardly
expect to come up into that row?" said Sunderline, smiling.

"They began, some time," returned Marion.

"Yes; but for one thing, it wasn't a time when everybody else was
beginning. Shall I tell you plainly how it seems to me?"

"I wish you would."

They had walked slowly for the last three or four minutes, till they
had come to the beginning of the paling in which, a little further
on, was the white gate. They paused here; Frank Sunderline rested
his box of tools on the low wall that ran up and joined the fence,
and Marion turned and stood with her face toward him in the western
light, and her little pink-lined linen sunshade up between her and
the low sun,--between her and the roadway also, down which might
come any curious passers-by.

"It seems to me," said Frank Sunderline, "that women are getting on
to the platforms nowadays, not so much for any real errand they have
there, as just for the sake of saying, I'm here! I think it is very
much the 'to be seen of men' motive,--the poorest part of women's
characters,--that plays itself out in this way, as it always has
done in dancing and dressing and acting, and what not. It isn't that
a woman might not be on a platform, if she were called there, as
well as anywhere else. There never was a woman came out before the
world in any grand, true way, that she wasn't all the more honored
and attended to because she _was_ a woman. There are some things too
good to be made common; things that ought to be saved up for a
special time, so that they may _be_ special. If it falls to a woman
to be a Queen, and to open and dismiss her Parliament, nobody in all
the kingdom but thinks the words come nobler and sweeter for a
woman's saying them. But that's because she is _put_ there, not
because she climbs up some other way. If a woman honestly has
something that she must say--some great word from the Lord, or for
her country, or for suffering people,--then let her say it; and
every real woman's husband, and every real mother's son, will hear
her with his very heart. Or if even she has some sure wonderful
gift,--if she can sing, or read, or recite; if she can stir people
up to good and beautiful things as _one in a thousand_, that's her
errand; let her do it, and let the thousand come to hear. But she
ought to be certain sure, or else she's leaving her real errand
behind. Don't let everybody, just because the door is open, rush in
w