After a brief pause she added, “There is truth in what you say, a ball must strike hard before it can rebound. Society must be fearfully outraged before it turns upon the offender, if he be a person of consequence. But you cannot expect the offender to do his worst, to dash himself to pieces, in order that a better state of morals may be built upon his ruin. We have not yet risen to such sublimity of devotion and self-sacrifice. I think the fault and the remedy both, lie more with the good people,—the people who make a principle of moral conduct. They allow us to cajole them into silence, they wink at our misdeeds. They know what we are up to, but they conceal the knowledge,—heaven knows why!—as carefully as we do our vices. Contenting themselves with breaking out in general denunciations which nobody accepts as personal rebuke.”
This was such a familiar picture that for a moment I fancied myself upon the Earth again. And I thought, what a difficult position the good have to maintain everywhere, for having accepted the championship of a cause whose standards are the highest and best! We expect them to be wise, tender, strong, just, stern, merciful, charitable, unyielding, forgiving, sinless, fearless.
“Elodia,” I said presently, “you can hardly understand what a shock this—this conversation has been to me. I started out with saying that I had often tried to fancy what our civilization might have done for you. I see more clearly now. You are the victim of the harshest and cruelest assumption that has ever been upheld concerning woman,—that her nature is no finer, holier than man’s. I have reverenced womanhood all my life as the highest and purest thing under heaven, and I will, I must, hold fast to that faith, to that rock on which the best traditions of our Earth are founded.”
“Do your women realize what they have got to live up to?” she asked ironically.
“There are things in men which offset their virtues,” I returned, in justice to my own sex. “Where men are strong, women are gentle, where women are faithful, men are brave, and so on.”
“How charming to have the one nature dovetail into the other so neatly!” she exclaimed. “I seem to see a vision, shall I tell it to you,—a vision of your Earth? In the Beginning, you know that is the way in which all our traditions start out, there was a great heap of Qualities stacked in a pyramid upon the Earth. And the human creatures were requested to step up and help themselves to such as suited their tastes. There was a great scramble, and your sex, having some advantages in the way of muscle and limb,—and not having yet acquired the arts of courtesy and gallantry for which you are now so distinguished,—pressed forward and took first choice. Naturally you selected the things which were agreeable to possess in themselves, and the exercise of which would most redound to your glory; such virtues as chastity, temperance, patience, modesty, piety, and some minor graces, were thrust aside and eventually forced upon the weaker sex,—since it was necessary that all the Qualities should be used in order to make a complete Human Nature. Is not that a pretty fable?”
She arose and shook out her draperies and spread her parasol. There were crimson spots in her cheeks, I felt that I had angered her,—and on the other hand, she had outraged my finest feelings. But we were both capable of self-government.
“It must be near dinner time,” she said, quietly.
I walked along by her side in silence.
As we again crossed the brooklet, she stooped and picked a long raceme of small white, delicately odorous flowers, and together we analyzed them, and I recognized them as belonging to our family of convallaria majalis. This led to a discussion of comparative botany on the two planets,—a safe, neutral topic. In outward appearance our mutual attitude was unchanged. Inwardly, there had been to me something like the moral upheaval of the universe. For the first time I had melancholy symptoms of nostalgia, and passionately regretted that I had ever exchanged the Earth for Mars.