rights and privileges."

"They will not remedy any of the present evils in that way," answered
Harrison, apparently addressing himself to Ashburner, but he seemed to
be talking at Benson and through him at Benson's wife, or his own, or
both of them. "Our theory and practice was that a young girl should
enjoy herself in all freedom; that her age and condition were those of
pleasure and frolic--of dissipation, if you will--that after her
marriage she, comparatively speaking, retired from the world, not
through any conventional rule or imaginary standard of propriety, but of
her own free will, and in the natural course of things; because the
cares of maternity and her household gave her sufficient employment at
home. A woman who takes a proper interest in her family gives them the
first place in her thoughts, and is always ready to talk about them. Now
these domestic details are the greatest possible bore to a mere
fashionable casual drawing-room acquaintance. Hence you see that the
French, whose chief aim is to talk well in a drawing-room or an opera
box, utterly detest and unmercifully ridicule every thing connected with
domesticity or home life. On the other hand, if a married woman never
talks of these things or lets you think of them, she does not take a
proper interest in her family. No, the fault of youth is with the other
sex. There are too few men about, and too many boys. And the more
married belles there are the more will the boys be encouraged. For your
married belles like to have men about them younger than themselves--it
makes them appear younger, or at least they think so; and besides, such
youths are more easily managed and more subservient. But, still worse,
the more these boys usurp the place of men in society, the more boyish
and retrograde will the few men become who continue to divide the honors
of society with them. When Plato enumerated among the signs of a
republic in the last stage of decadence, that the youth imitate and
rival old men, and the old men let themselves down to a level with the
youth, he anticipated exactly the state of things that has come to pass
among us. Look at that little friend of yours with the beard--I don't
mean Edwards, but an older man about his size."

"Dicky Bleecker, I suppose you mean," growled Benson: "he's as much your
friend--or your wife's--as he is mine."

"Well, he is my contemporary, I may say; perhaps five years at most my
junior. What perceptible sign of ma