“Well, then, all right,” said Vernon, “I don’t know what I’ve done. All I have done has been to champion a measure—and I may add, without boasting, I hope, with some success—all I have done has been to champion a measure which was to benefit your sex, to secure your rights, to—”
“Morley!” Mrs. Overman Hodge-Lathrop said, cutting him short. “Morley, have you indeed fallen so low? It is incomprehensible to me, that a young man who had the mother you have, who had the advantages you have had, who was born and bred as you were, should so easily have lost his respect for women!”
“Lost my respect for women!” cried Vernon, and then he laughed. “Now, Mrs. Hodge-Lathrop,” he went on with a shade of irritation in his tone, “this is too much!”
Mrs. Overman Hodge-Lathrop was calm.
“Have you shown her any respect?” she went on. “Have you not, on the contrary, said and done everything you could, to drag her down from her exalted station, to pull her to the earth, to bring her to a level with men, to make her soil herself with politics, by scheming and voting and caucusing and buttonholing and wire-pulling? You would have her degrade and unsex herself by going to the polls, to caucuses and conventions; you would have her, no doubt, in time, lobbying for and against measures in the council chamber and the legislature.”
Mrs. Overman Hodge-Lathrop paused and lifted her gold eye-glasses once more to the bridge of her high, aristocratic nose.
“Is it that kind of women you have been brought up with, Morley? Do we look like that sort? Glance around this table—do we look like that sort of women?”
The ladies stiffened haughtily, disdainfully, under the impending inspection, knowing full well how easily they would pass muster.
“And, if that were not enough,” Mrs. Overman Hodge-Lathrop went on inexorably, “we come here to plead with you and find you hobnobbing with that mannish thing, that female lawyer!”
She spoke the word female as if it conveyed some distinct idea of reproach. She was probing another chop with her fork. She had sent the pot of coffee back to the kitchen, ordering the waiter to tell the cook that she was accustomed to drink her coffee hot.