Severnius had returned. After dinner he invited me out onto the veranda to smoke a cigar,—he was very particular not to fill the house with tobacco smoke. Elodia, he said, did not like the odor. I wondered whether he took such pains out of consideration for her, or whether he simply dreaded her power to retaliate with her obnoxious vapor. The latter supposition, however, I immediately repudiated as being unjust to him; he was the gentlest and sweetest of men.
My mind was so full of the subject Elodia and I had discussed that I could not forbear repeating my old question to him:
“Tell me, my friend,” I entreated, “do you in your inmost soul believe that men and women have one common nature,—that women are no better at all than men, and that men may, if they will, be as pure as—well as women ought to be?”
Severnius smiled. “If you cannot find an answer to your first question here in Paleveria, I think you may in any of the savage countries, where I am quite positive the women exhibit no finer qualities than their lords. And for a very conclusive reply to your second question,—go to Caskia!”
“Does the same idea of equality, or likeness rather, exist in Caskia that prevails here?” I asked.
“O, yes,” said he, “but their plane of life is so much higher. I cannot but believe in the equality” he added, “bad as things are with us. We hope that we are progressing onward and upward; all our teaching and preaching tend toward that, as you may find in our churches and schools, and in our literature. I am so much of an optimist as to believe that we are getting better and better all the time. One evidence is that there is less of shamelessness than there used to be with respect to some of the grossest offences against decency. People do not now glory in their vices, they hide them.”
“Then you approve of concealment!” I exclaimed.
“It is better than open effrontery, it shows that the moral power in society is the stronger; that it is making the way of the transgressor hard, driving him into dark corners.”
I contrasted this in my mind with Elodia’s theory on the same subject. The two differed, but there was a certain harmony after all.
Severnius added, apropos of what had gone before, “It does not seem fair to me that one half of humanity should hang upon the skirts of the other half; it is better that we should go hand in hand, even though our progress is slow.”