d it; he could
only see that it was all about the gentleness and goodness of women, and
how, during the long ages of history, they had been trampled under the
iron heel of man. It was about their equality--perhaps even (he was not
definitely conscious) about their superiority. It was about their day
having come at last, about the universal sisterhood, about their duty to
themselves and to each other. It was about such matters as these, and
Basil Ransom was delighted to observe that such matters as these didn't
spoil it. The effect was not in what she said, though she said some such
pretty things, but in the picture and figure of the half-bedizened
damsel (playing, now again, with her red fan), the visible freshness and
purity of the little effort. When she had gained confidence she opened
her eyes, and their shining softness was half the effect of her
discourse. It was full of school-girl phrases, of patches of remembered
eloquence, of childish lapses of logic, of flights of fancy which might
indeed have had success at Topeka; but Ransom thought that if it had
been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the
doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an
intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be
fascinating. She might have offended the taste of certain people--Ransom
could imagine that there were other Boston circles in which she would be
thought pert; but for himself all he could feel was that to _his_
starved senses she irresistibly appealed. He was the stiffest of
conservatives, and his mind was steeled against the inanities she
uttered--the rights and wrongs of women, the equality of the sexes, the
hysterics of conventions, the further stultification of the suffrage,
the prospect of conscript mothers in the national Senate. It made no
difference; she didn't mean it, she didn't know what she meant, she had
been stuffed with this trash by her father, and she was neither more nor
less willing to say it than to say anything else; for the necessity of
her nature was not to make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit
those charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young
attitudes, to shake her braided locks like a naiad rising from the
waves, to please every one who came near her, and to be happy that she
pleased. I know not whether Ransom was aware of the bearings of this
interpretation, which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowne