men." And before the
sound had ceased, there flashed into his thoughts a story concerning an
enlightened young lady of Stockholm, who gave a lecture to advance the
theory that woman's intellect suffered from the habit of allowing her
hair to grow so long. It was years since this trifle had recurred to
his mind; it came he knew not how, and he clutched at it like the
drowning man at a straw. Before he really understood what he was about,
he had begun to narrate the anecdote, and suddenly, to his
astonishment, he was rewarded with universal peals of laughter. The
noise dispelled his anguish of nervousness; he drew a deep breath,
grasped the table before him, and was able to speak as freely as if he
had been on his own hearth-rug in Clement's Inn.

Make a popular audience laugh, and you have a hold upon its attention.
Able now to distinguish the faces that were gazing at him, Denzil
perceived that he had begun with a lucky stroke; the people were in
expectation of more merriment, and sat beaming with good-humour. He saw
the Mayor spread himself and stroke his beard, and the Mayoress simper
as she caught a friend's eye. Now he might venture to change his tone
and become serious.

Decidedly, his views were moderate. From the beginning he allowed it to
be understood that, whatever might be the effect of long hair, he for
one considered it becoming, and was by no means in favour of reducing
it to the male type. The young lady of Stockholm might or might not
have been indebted for her wider mental scope to the practice of
curtailing her locks, yet he had known many Swedish ladies (and ladies
of England, too) who, in spite of lovely hair, managed to preserve an
exquisite sense of the distinctions of womanhood, and this (advanced
opinion notwithstanding) he maintained was the principal thing. But,
the fact that so many women were nowadays lifting up their voices in a
demand for various degrees of emancipation seemed to show that the long
tresses and the flowing garb had really, by process of civilization,
come to symbolize certain traditions of inferiority which weighed upon
the general female consciousness. "Let us, then, ask what these
traditions are, and what is to be said for or against them from the
standpoint of a liberal age."

Denzil no longer looked with horror at the face of the clock; his only
fear was lest the hands should move too rapidly, and forbid him to
utter in spacious periods all he had on his mind. By half