"I am sorry I do my dear Alma Mater such lamentable discredit; but, unfortunately, we were not taught to wear our diplomas on our hats as advertisements of scholarship."
"You certainly amaze me!"
"Perhaps you will excuse my frankness in assuring you that sensation at least is mutual."
"With your educational advantages, to lock up your mind in a stockade of provincialism! Desectionalize yourself!"
"May I ask whether you spell your last verb with an x or a ct? I should prefer first to ascertain which process is demanded of me."
"Your Southern bigotry is a mill-stone around your neck. The very word 'emancipation' is a red rag to old slaveholders and their progeny. You never can forgive us for breaking the shackles of groaning millions held in bondage."
Eglah laughed.
"Pardon me, but it certainly is ludicrous that one possessing your 'broad culture and desectionalized' horizon of thought should really believe in that old worn-out 'raw-head and bloody-bones' figure of speech which has done duty so long. It surely is entitled to decent interment where all dilapidated scarecrows cease from troubling. We Southern people no more want our negroes back as slaves than you desire the return of hordes of Indians whom you so completely dispossessed of their native lands in your 'wild and rapacious West,' and whom a 'white, fatherly' government is rapidly reducing to extinction by its beneficent agencies. The white South is 'emancipated' from the moral responsibility of elevating the black race now so happy in 'national' tutelage, where their guardians taught them the system of bookkeeping and all the subtle processes of the 'Freedmen's Bureau.'"
"How lonely you must feel in Washington. You have no more regard for the rights of your own sex than for—" She stammered and coughed.
"Indeed, I have the most affectionate and jealous regard for every right that inheres in my dower of American womanhood. I claim and enjoy the right to be as cultured, as learned, as useful, and—if you please—as ornamental in society and at home as my individual limitations will permit. I have no wrongs, no grievances, no crying need to usurp lines of work that will break down the barriers God set between men and women. I am not in rebellion against legal statutes, nor the canons of well-established decency and refinement in feminine usage, and, finally, I am so inordinately proud of being a well-born Southern woman, with a full complement of honorable great-grandfathers and blue-blooded, stainless great-grand-mothers, that I have neither pretext nor inclination to revolt against mankind."