Women never will come to their
proper position in the world, even as companions of men, which you regard
as their highest office, until they have the ability to be
self-supporting."

"Oh, I admitted the fact of the independence of women a long time ago.
Every one does that before he comes to middle life. About the shifting
all round of this burden of earning a living, I am not so sure. It does
not appear yet to make competition any less; perhaps competition would
disappear if everybody did earn his own living and no more. I wonder,
by-the-way, if the girls, the young women, of the class we seem to be
discussing ever do earn as much as would pay the wages of the servants
who are hired to do the housework in their places?"

"That is a most ignoble suggestion," I could not help saying, "when you
know that the object in modern life is the cultivation of the mind, the
elevation of women, and men also, in intellectual life."

"I suppose so. I should like to have asked Abigail Adams's opinion on the
way to do it."

"One would think," I said, "that you didn't know that the spinning-jenny
and the stocking-knitter had been invented. Given these, the women's
college was a matter of course."

"Oh, I'm a believer in all kinds of machinery anything to save labor.
Only, I have faith that neither the jenny nor the college will change
human nature, nor take the romance out of life."

"So have I," said my wife. "I've heard two things affirmed: that women
who receive a scientific or professional education lose their faith,
become usually agnostics, having lost sensitiveness to the mysteries of
life."

"And you think, therefore, that they should not have a scientific
education?"

"No, unless all scientific prying into things is a mistake. Women may be
more likely at first to be upset than men, but they will recover their
balance when the novelty is worn off. No amount of science will entirely
change their emotional nature; and besides, with all our science, I don't
see that the supernatural has any less hold on this generation than on
the former."

"Yes, and you might say the world was never before so credulous as it is
now. But what was the other thing?"

"Why, that co-education is likely to diminish marriages among the
co-educated. Daily familiarity in the classroom at the most
impressionable age, revelation of all the intellectual weaknesses and
petulances, absorption of mental routine on an equality, tend to destroy
the s