“Oh, my dear Britomarte! your experience of men has indeed been very bitter!”
“So bitter—so stringent, Justin, that it contracted and warped my judgment, until I attributed to your whole sex the follies and crimes that I had found only in the evil men immediately about me! And not only in my own generation, and in my sister’s life, but in the lives of my mother and my grandmother. Yes, Justin, it is true this strange chain of coincidences has run through many ages. If all the women of my race had been like me—proud, defiant, high-spirited, the phenomena might have been easily explained. It might have been said that they were a race of viragos who had nothing better to expect than misery in marriage. But this was not the case, at least with my immediate foremothers. No gentler women ever lived than were my mother and my grandmother.”
“But Britomarte, those gentle women, by too deep a submission, ruin their domestic happiness as often as the high-spirited do by their resistance. Men are not gods, dear love, and so they are very often spoiled by women. But there is no danger of your spoiling me in that manner, dear Britomarte,” laughed Justin.
“Indeed there is not,” she answered. “And for this reason—because you would never abuse the power that the law gives you over the outer circumstances of your wife’s life, or that she herself gives you over the inner world of her affections.”
“I think you do me justice, dear.”
“Ah, Justin, I grew up both in feelings and in principles a man-hater. My narrow personal experiences gave strength, bitterness and intensity to my feelings, and the frequent discussions of the topic of the day, ‘Woman’s Rights,’ gave form, shape and consistency to my opinions. And I became a very perfect man-hater.”
She paused and looked at him.
He was contemplating her with deep tenderness, but he made no observation, and she continued:
“It was at this very flood tide of my young soul’s life that I first met you, Justin. And soon, to my consternation, I found that I—a pledged man-hater—was loving you, Justin! loving you with my whole heart, just as all the women of my race had loved men, to their own destruction. How I hated and scorned myself for this love! how I struggled against it, battled with it, trampled on it, tried to tear it up, root it out, and utterly destroy it, you well know.”
“Ah!” smiled Justin.