send me a wonderful
child, and I want to do what's right by her. I want her to have the
reasonable education of a man and to keep her as far as possible from
the influence of the usual unthinking female. I neither want her
instructed in false modesty, lying, nor the deception of the male sex.
It is on the male virtues that I want the accent placed; bravery,
honesty, self-knowledge, and responsibility for her words and conduct;
good manly virtues that most women know only as words of the
dictionary."

Hugh stared across at me, and there was a look in his eyes of being
tolerant toward crass ignorance as he answered:

"There are whiles when you are more humorous than others, Jock Stair.
This is your most fanciful time yet. There's no such thing possible,
and ye can just rest by that! Ye can't make a woman into a man by any
method of rearing, for there are six thousand years of ancestry to
overcome. That's somewhat, and with the female physiology and the Lord
himself against you, I'm thinking it wise for you to have your daughter
reared like other women and to fulfil woman's great end."

"And what's that?" I asked.

"To marry and bring children into the world," he returned, as certainly
as he would have stated the time of day.

"When all's said and done and theorized over concerning the female
sex," he went on, "ye just find yourself back at that. Ye can't educate
a woman as ye can a man; she's not got the same faculties to take in
the information that ye offer her. Why," he cried, "ye can't give her
any sense of abstract right or wrong. In order to protect her young she
has inherited certain keen faculties and instincts which we poor male
creatures are without; but from the minute she becomes a wife or mother
she ceases in some degree to have a conscience. No," he finished, "when
a woman's emotions are stirred you can't believe a word she says."

"Ye've seen for yourself that Nancy's different from the girl children
ye've known," I said, with some remonstrance in my voice.

"She has power, true. And magnetism, true. And great beauty," he
answered, counting these on his fingers as though they were points in
law; "but give her a man's education, and what have ye done? Simply
made a dangerous contrivance of her to get her own way. I tell ye,
Jock," he said in conclusion, "ye can't civilize women. They are not
intended to be civilized."

The longer I thought this talk over, the more firmly I became fixed in
the beli