his shouts or grunts at Aminta's report of the
secretary's ideas on various topics, particularly the proposal that the
lords of the land should head the land in a revolutionary effort to make
law of his crazy, top-heavy notions, with a self-satisfied ejaculation:
'He has not favoured me with any of these puffballs of his.'

The deduction was, that the author sagaciously considered them adapted
for the ear of a woman; they were womanish--i.e. flighty, gossamer. To
the host of males, all ideas are female until they are made facts.

This idea, proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas,
or reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship
with the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them
in history by certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and
publishers, Lord Ormont thought amazingly comical. English nobles
heading the weavers, cobblers, and barbers of England! He laughed, but
he said, 'Charlotte would listen to that.'

The dread, high-sitting Lady Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking, a
woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to
strike a particular set of bells hanging in her cranium. She patronized
blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of
the people, not with a notion of maintaining our English aristocracy
eminent in history.

Lady Charlotte, however, would be the foremost to swoop down on the
secretary's ideas about the education of women.

On that subject, Aminta said she did not know what to think.

Now, if a man states the matter he thinks, and a woman does but listen,
whether inclining to agree or not, a perceptible stamp is left on soft
wax. Lord Ormont told her so, with cavalier kindness.

She confessed 'she did not know what to think,' when the secretary
proposed the education and collocation of boys and girls in one group,
never separated, declaring it the only way for them to learn to know and
to respect one another. They were to learn together, play together, have
matches together, as a scheme for stopping the mischief between them.

'But, my dear girl, don't you see, the devilry was intended by Nature.
Life would be the coldest of dishes without it.' And as for mixing the
breeched and petticoated in those young days--'I can't enter into it,'
my lord considerately said. 'All I can tell you is, I know boys.'

Aminta persisted in looking thoughtful. 'Things are bad, as they are
now,' she said.

'A