"In that event, may I venture to wonder where and how you and Douglass stand in your own estimation? If quotations are en règle, I can match your reverence, though unfortunately my feminine memory is not like yours, a tireless beast of burden, and I must be allowed to read. Here is the book close at hand, in my stocking basket. Now, wise and gentle sirs, this is my ideal of proper, healthful, feminine education, as contrasted with pur new-fangled method of making girls either lay-figures for millinery, jewellery, and frizzled false hair, or else—far more horrible still—social hermaphrodites, who storm the posts that have been assigned to men ever since that venerable and sacred time when 'Adam delved and Eve span,' and who, forsaking holy home haunts, wage war against nature on account of the mistake made in their sex, and clamour for the 'hallowed inalienable right' to jostle and be jostled at the polls; to brawl in the market place, and to rant on the rostrum, like a bevy of bedlamities. Now when I begin to read, listen, and tell me frankly, whether when you both make up your minds to present me, one a sister, the other a daughter, you will select your wives from among quaint Evelyn's almost obsolete type, or whether you will commit your name, affections, wardrobe, larder, pantry and poultry to a strong-minded female 'scientist,' who will neglect your socks and buttons, to ascertain exactly how many Vibriones and Bacteria float in a drop of fluid, and when you come home tired and very hungry, will comfort you, and nobly atone for the injury of an ill-cooked and worse-served dinner, by regaling your weary ears with her own ingenious and brilliant interpretation and translation of Ælia Lælia Crispis! Here is my old-fashioned English damsel, meek as a violet, fresh as a dewy daisy, and sweet as a bed of thyme and marjoram. 'The style and method of life are quite changed, as well as the language, since the days of our ancestors, simple and plain as they were, courting their wives for their modesty, frugality, keeping at home, good housewifery, and other economical virtues then in reputation. And when the young damsels were taught all these at home in the country at their parents' houses; the portion they brought being more in virtue than money, she being a richer match than any one who could bring a million, and nothing else to commend her. The virgins and young ladies of that golden age put their hands to the spindle, nor disdained the needle; were obsequious and helpful to their parents, instructed in the management of the family, and gave presage of making excellent wives. Their retirements were devout and religious books, their recreations in the distillery and knowledge of plants and their virtues for the comfort of their poor neighbours, and use of the family, which wholesome diet and kitchen physic preserved in health. Then things were natural, plain, and wholesome; nothing was superfluous, nothing necessary wanted. The poor were relieved bountifully, and charity was as warm as the kitchen, where the fire was perpetual.' Now, if Regina were only my child, I should with some modifications train her after this mellow old style."
"Then I am truly thankful she is not my sister! Fancy her pretty pearly fingers encrusted with gingerbread-dough; or her entrance into the library heralded by the perfume of moly, or of basil and sage, tolerable only as the familiars of a dish of sausage meat! Don't soil my dainty white dove with the dust and soot and rank odours that belong to the culinary realm."
"Your white dove? Do you propose to adopt her? A month hence when you are on your way to India, what difference can it possibly make to you, whether she is as brown as a quail or black as a crow? Before you come back, she will have been conscripted into the staid army of matrons, and transmogrified into stout Mrs. Ptolemy Thomson, or lean and careworn Mrs. Simon Smith, or worse than all, erudite Mrs. Professor Belshazzar Brown, spelling Hercules after the learned style, with the loss of the u, and the substitution of a k; or making the ghost of Ulysses tear his hair, by writing the name of his enchantress 'Kirké'!"
As Mrs. Lindsay spoke the smile vanished from her lips, and looking keenly at her son's countenance she detected the change that crossed it, the sudden glow that mounted to the edge of his hair.
Avoiding her eyes, he answered hastily: "Suppose those distinguished gentlemen you mention chance to be scholars, savans, and disposed to follow the advice of Joubert in making their matrimonial selection: 'We should choose for a wife only the woman we should choose for a friend, were she a man.' Think you mere habits of domesticity, or skill in herbalism, would arrest and fix their fancy?"
"But, Bishop, they might consider the Talmud more venerable authority than Joubert, and the Talmud says, so I am told: 'Descend a step in choosing a wife; mount a step in choosing a friend.'"
"Thank heaven! there is indeed no Salique Law in the realm of learning. Mother, I believe one of the happiest auguries of the future consists in the broadening views of education that are now held by some of our ablest thinkers. If in the morning of our religious system, St. Peter deemed it obligatory on us to be able and 'ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you,' how doubly imperative is that duty in this controversial age, when the popular formula has been adopted, 'to doubt, to inquire, to discover;' when the hammer of the geologist pounds into dust the idols of tradition, and the lenses of astronomy pierce the blue wastes of space, which in our childhood we fondly believed were the habitat of cherubim and seraphim. Now, mother, if you will only insure my ears against those pink tweezers, of which they bear stinging recollections, I should like to explain myself."
Mrs. Lindsay plunged her hands into the depths of her stocking basket, and said sententiously:
"The temple of Janus is closed."
"What is the origin of the doctrine that erudition is the sole prerogative of men, and that it proves as dangerous in a woman's hands, as phosphorus or gunpowder in those of a baby——"