"I am going to take a very nice young woman," said Mr. Glascock.
"I hate that word woman, sir, uttered with the half-hidden sneer which always accompanies its expression from the mouth of a man."
"Sneer, Miss Petrie!"
"I quite allow that it is involuntary, and not analysed or understood by yourselves. If you speak of a dog, you intend to do so with affection, but there is always contempt mixed with it. The so-called chivalry of man to woman is all begotten in the same spirit. I want no favour, but I claim to be your equal."
"I thought that American ladies were generally somewhat exacting as to those privileges which chivalry gives them."
"It is true, sir, that the only rank we know in our country is in that precedence which man gives to woman. Whether we maintain that, or whether we abandon it, we do not intend to purchase it at the price of an acknowledgment of intellectual inferiority. For myself, I hate chivalry;—what you call chivalry. I can carry my own chair, and I claim the right to carry it whithersoever I may please."
Mr. Glascock remained with her for some time, but made no opportunity for giving that invitation to Monkhams of which Caroline had spoken. As he said afterwards, he found it impossible to expect her to attend to any subject so trivial; and when, afterwards, Caroline told him, with some slight mirth,—the capability of which on such a subject was coming to her with her new ideas of life,—that, though he was partly saved as a man and a brother, still he was partly the reverse as a feudal lord, he began to reflect that Wallachia Petrie would be a guest with whom he would find it very difficult to make things go pleasant at Monkhams. "Does she not bully you horribly?" he asked.
"Of course she bullies me," Caroline answered; "and I cannot expect you to understand as yet how it is that I love her and like her; but I do. If I were in distress to-morrow, she would give everything she has in the world to put me right."
"So would I," said he.
"Ah, you;—that is a matter of course. That is your business now. And she would give everything she has in the world to set the world right. Would you do that?"