happiness of his companion; for a mournful experience teaches that
piety begins only where passion ends, and that principles are strongest
where temptations are most rare."

"But what has all this to do with us?" I inquired severely.

"You were displeased at our law classing you as it does, and I merely
wish to justify it," he answered. "Creatures who habitually say yes to
everything a man proposes, when no one can oblige them to say it, and
when it is so often fatal, are plainly not responsible beings."

"I shall never say it to you again, my dear man," I said.

"And not only that fatal weakness," he continued, "but what is there,
candidly, to distinguish you from children? You are older, but not
wiser,--really not so wise, for with years you lose the common sense you
had as children. Have you ever heard a group of women talking reasonably
together?"

"Yes--we do!" Irais and I cried in a breath.

"It has interested me," went on the Man of Wrath, "in my idle moments,
to listen to their talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little
stories they told of their best friends who were absent, to note the
spiteful little digs they gave their best friends who were present, to
watch the utter incredulity with which they listened to the tale of
some other woman's conquests, the radiant good faith they displayed in
connection with their own, the instant collapse into boredom, if some
topic of so-called general interest, by some extraordinary chance,
were introduced." "You must have belonged to a particularly nice set,"
remarked Irais.

"And as for politics," he said, "I have never heard them mentioned among
women."

"Children and idiots are not interested in such things," I said.

"And we are much too frightened of being put in prison," said Irais.

"In prison?" echoed Minora.

"Don't you know," said Irais, turning to her "that if you talk about
such things here you run a great risk of being imprisoned?"

"But why?"

"But why? Because, though you yourself may have meant nothing but what
was innocent, your words may have suggested something less innocent to
the evil minds of your hearers; and then the law steps in, and calls
it dolus eventualis, and everybody says how dreadful, and off you go to
prison and are punished as you deserve to be."

Minora looked mystified.

"That is not, however, your real reason for not discussing them," said
the Man of Wrath; "they simply do not interest you. Or it may be, that
you