“Rights, what's that?” asked Evelyn.
“Well, child, your education has been neglected. Thank McDonald for that.”
“Don't you know, Evelyn,” the governess explained, “that we have always said that women had a right to have any employment, or do anything they were fitted to do?”
“Oh, that, of course; I thought everybody said that. That is natural. But I mean all this fuss. I guess I don't understand what you all are talking about.” And her bright face broke out of its look of perplexity into a smile.
“Why, poor thing,” said her mother, “you belong to the down-trodden sex. Only you haven't found it out.”
“But, mamma,” and the girl seemed to be turning the thing over in her mind, as was her wont with any new proposition, “there seem to be in history a good many women who never found it out either.”
“It is not so now. I tell you we are all in a wretched condition.”
“You look it, mamma,” replied Evelyn, who perfectly understood when her mother was chaffing.
“But I think I don't care so much for the lawyers,” Mrs. Mavick continued, with more air of conviction; “what I can't stand are the doctors, the female doctors. I'd rather have a female priest about me than a female doctor.”
This was not altogether banter, for there had been times in Carmen's career when the externals of the Roman Church attracted her, and she wished she had an impersonal confidant, to whom she could confess—well, not everything-and get absolution. And she could make a kind of confidant of a sympathetic doctor. But she went on: