s, and have few opportunities for the wide
observation that men enjoy, isn't it pretty well that the foremost
living writers of fiction are women?

HERBERT. You can say that for the moment, since Thackeray and
Dickens have just died. But it does not affect the general
estimate. We are inundated with a flood of weak writing. Take the
Sunday-school literature, largely the product of women; it has n't as
much character as a dried apple pie. I don't know what we are coming to
if the presses keep on running.

OUR NEXT DOOR. We are living, we are dwelling, in a grand and awful
time; I'm glad I don't write novels.

THE PARSON. So am I.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I tried a Sunday-school book once; but I made the
good boy end in the poorhouse, and the bad boy go to Congress; and
the publisher said it wouldn't do, the public wouldn't stand that
sort of thing. Nobody but the good go to Congress.

THE MISTRESS. Herbert, what do you think women are good for?

OUR NEXT DOOR. That's a poser.

HERBERT. Well, I think they are in a tentative state as to
literature, and we cannot yet tell what they will do. Some of our
most brilliant books of travel, correspondence, and writing on topics
in which their sympathies have warmly interested them, are by women.
Some of them are also strong writers in the daily journals.

MANDEVILLE. I 'm not sure there's anything a woman cannot do as well
as a man, if she sets her heart on it.

THE PARSON. That's because she's no conscience.

CHORUS. O Parson!

THE PARSON. Well, it does n't trouble her, if she wants to do
anything. She looks at the end, not the means. A woman, set on
anything, will walk right through the moral crockery without wincing.
She'd be a great deal more unscrupulous in politics than the average
man. Did you ever see a female lobbyist? Or a criminal? It is Lady
Macbeth who does not falter. Don't raise your hands at me! The
sweetest angel or the coolest devil is a woman. I see in some of the
modern novels we have been talking of the same unscrupulous daring, a
blindness to moral distinctions, a constant exaltation of a passion
into a virtue, an entire disregard of the immutable laws on which the
family and society rest. And you ask lawyers and trustees how
scrupulous women are in business transactions!

THE FIRE-TENDER. Women are often ignorant of affairs, and, besides,
they may have a notion often that a woman ought to be privileged more
than a man in business matters; but I tell y