"I thought you envied nobody," answered Cora, somewhat wonderingly.
Pauline gave a little soft cry. "You mean because I am rich, no doubt!" she said, a kind of melancholy sarcasm tinging her words.
"Riches mean a great deal," said Cora.
"But if you have no special endowment that separates you from the rest of the world, you are still a woman."
"I am not sorry to be a woman."
"No! because you are a living protest against the inferiority of our sex. You can do something; you need not forever have men doing something for you, like the great majority of us!" Pauline's gray eyes had kindled, and her lips were slightly tremulous as they began to shape her next sentence. "Most of us are sorry to be women," she went on, "but I think a great many of us are sorry to be the sort of women fate or circumstance makes us. There is the galling trouble. If we have no gift, like yours, that can compel men's recognition and respect, we must content ourselves with being merged into the big commonplace multitude. And to be merged into the big commonplace multitude is to be more or less despised. This may sound like the worst kind of cynicism, but I assure you, Miss Dares, that it is by no means as flippant as that. I have seen more of life than you ... why not? You perhaps have heard a fact or two about my past. I have had a past—and not a pleasant one, either. And experience (which is the name we give our disappointments, very often) has taught me that if we could see down to the innermost depth of any good man's liking for any good woman, we would find there an undercurrent of real contempt."
"Contempt!" echoed Cora. She had slightly thrown back her head, either in dismay or denial.
"Yes—contempt," asseverated Pauline. "I believe, in all honesty, at this hour, that if the charm which our sex exerts over the other—the physical fascination, and the fascination of sentiment, tenderness, idealization—had never existed, we would have been literally crushed out of being long ago. Men have permitted us to live thus far through the centuries, not because we are weaker than they, but because some extraordinary and undiscoverable law has made them bow to our weakness instead of destroying it outright. They always destroy every other thing weaker than themselves, except woman. They have no compunction, no hesitation. History will show you this, if you accept its annals in an unbiased spirit. They either eat the lower animals, or else put them into usages of the most severe labor. They leave woman unharmed because Nature has so commanded them. But here they are the slaves of an edict which they obey more blindly, more instinctively, than even the best of them know."
"I can't believe that these are your actual views!" now exclaimed Cora. "I can't believe that you rate the sacred emotion of love as something to be discussed like a mere scientific problem!"
Pauline went up to the speaker and stood close beside her while she responded,—