the
bushes. She bit her little teeth together.

"I was coming up in Cobb & Co.'s the other day. At a little wayside
hotel we had to change the large coach for a small one. We were ten
passengers, eight men and two women. As I sat in the house the gentlemen
came and whispered to me, 'There is not room for all in the new coach,
take your seat quickly.' We hurried out, and they gave me the best
seat, and covered me with rugs, because it was drizzling. Then the last
passenger came running up to the coach--an old woman with a wonderful
bonnet, and a black shawl pinned with a yellow pin.

"'There is no room,' they said; 'you must wait till next week's coach
takes you up;' but she climbed on to the step, and held on at the window
with both hands.

"'My son-in-law is ill, and I must go and see him,' she said.

"'My good woman,' said one, 'I am really exceedingly sorry that your
son-in-law is ill; but there is absolutely no room for you here.'

"'You had better get down,' said another, 'or the wheel will catch you.'

"I got up to give her my place.

"'Oh, no, no!' they cried, 'we will not allow that.'

"'I will rather kneel,' said one, and he crouched down at my feet; so
the woman came in.

"There were nine of us in that coach, and only one showed chivalrous
attention--and that was a woman to a woman.

"I shall be old and ugly, too, one day, and I shall look for men's
chivalrous help, but I shall not find it.

"The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done,
and then they fly over them. I don't know if the flowers feel grateful
to the bees; they are great fools if they do."

"But some women," said Waldo, speaking as though the words forced
themselves from him at that moment, "some women have power."

She lifted her beautiful eyes to his face.

"Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should
have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of
water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do
its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And
it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it
will act. If Goethe had been stolen away a child, and reared in a robber
horde in the depths of a German forest, do you think the world would
have had "Faust" and "Iphegenie?" But he would have been Goethe
still--stronger, wiser than his fellows. At night, round their
watch-fire, he would have chanted wil