"Very much so," she replied, "but I have always understood that it is a mistake to be too sanguine."
"Perhaps I'd better make it fifteen years, then," he said, laughing. "I should have a choice of professions by that time at any rate. You know the proverb that 'At forty every man is either a fool or a physician.'" She looked at him with a smile. "Yes," he said, "I realize the alternative." She laughed a little, but did not reply.
"Seriously," he continued, "I know that in everything worth accomplishing there is a lot of drudgery to be gone through with at the first, and perhaps it seems the more irksome to me because I have been so long idly my own master. However," he added, "I shall get down to it, or up to it, after a while, I dare say. That is my intention, at any rate."
"I don't think I have ever wished that I were a man," she said after a moment, "but I often find myself envying a man's opportunities."
"Do not women have opportunities, too?" he said. "Certainly they have greatly to do with the determination of affairs."
"Oh, yes," she replied, "it is the usual answer that woman's part is to influence somebody. As for her own life, it is largely made for her. She has, for the most part, to take what comes to her by the will of others."
"And yet," said John, "I fancy that there has seldom been a great career in which some woman's help or influence was not a factor."
"Even granting that," she replied, "the career was the man's, after all, and the fame and visible reward. A man will sometimes say, 'I owe all my success to my wife, or my mother, or sister,' but he never really believes it, nor, in fact, does any one else. It is his success, after all, and the influence of the woman is but a circumstance, real and powerful though it may be. I am not sure," she added, "that woman's influence, so called, isn't rather an overrated thing. Women like to feel that they have it, and men, in matters which they hold lightly, flatter them by yielding, but I am doubtful if a man ever arrives at or abandons a settled course or conviction through the influence of a woman, however exerted."
"I think you are wrong," said John, "and I feel sure of so much as this: that a man might often be or do for a woman's sake that which he would not for its sake or his own."
"That is quite another thing," she said. "There is in it no question of influence; it is one of impulse and motive."