"Politics are things going on at the present time, and no real lady is expected to take interest in them," says she.
"What is the present time? The breath we are drawing—nothing more. That very breath has now gone into the past, which is history. All the rest is guess-work and prophecy," says I.
"Dear me, how strong-minded you are," says she, giving her curls a toss; "I suppose you would be splendidly eloquent on Woman's Rights too."
"No," said I, "all my life I have had more rights than I have known how to use, so I leave that question to persons who have no better field of ambition. Mine happens to be of a different kind. I want to make women wise, good, generous, faithful to duties that come down to them from their mothers. I want to improve women, miss, not turn them into contemptible men."
"By talking politics?" says she, as saucy as a sour apple; "what is the good of that if you don't go in for voting?"
"What is the good of any knowledge which may be turned into blessings by woman's influence?" says I, blandly.
"Then you believe that women ought to have influence in politics," says she.
"I think that women should have influence everywhere," said I, "but only as women. We are governed through the heart, and those finer portions of the intellect that people call taste. Men plant the grain and timber of every-day life with their strong hands, which God made for that very purpose. We women fill in the hollows and crevices and swelling banks with flowers and ferns and delicate shade-trees, which make the vigorous work of their strong hands beautiful."
Sisters, I said this to that stuck-up girl because I wanted to express an opinion on this subject—first, because it was my opinion, and again, because I know that it is yours, going as you do for it in a spirit of feminine spontaneosity. I don't want the nature of our Society misunderstood. We are not Woman's Righters, nor Woman's Wrongers, but straight out women, wanting nothing better on this earth than to be just as God made us, with a full, free, and generous development of all the femininities that belong to the sex.
For my part, I don't want to be a man; his work is too rough and hard for me. His thoughts have too heavy and coarse a grain. His clothes wouldn't fit me any better than his thoughts and duties.