“Not in my wildest moments,” said Robert.
“Why,” interposed Althea, “what else would you have me say, when I don’t? Doubtless it is something to do with some two or three-thousand-year-old-scare which some antediluvian ghost of you men put on my ancient shade, when you tried to tell as bad falsehoods as are betimes told now, concerning woman’s nature, duty and—concerning the secrecy necessary to be sustained about home-affairs, because of the untellable horrors prevalent within palace and hut,—where worse than brute passions usurp control over the priestesses of what—home? No, that is a word very generally needing to be illustrated by a new style of marital life. However, Daniel and I know what home is; and so do my children. There was nothing in our home which would not have bettered the world to know about. That is the reason I can’t tell you why I was averse to have a lot of little children educated and homed and cared for with Ethel,” she said perplexed. “Perhaps I was feeling stingy and tired. At any rate, I remember I wanted to get rich.
“But Daniel; consider what an exclusive home I was born and bred in, and how long ago it was, and what departures from old-fashioned dependency I even then had risked. The fact that of old, woman was chiefly protected in an enforced-penury, of which she was bitterly ashamed, tended to give her that preposterous fashion of (metaphorically) peeping out of doors and windows, and scurrying round to make the best of things before admitting eyes (much less individuals) into the secrets of the domicile where she slaved (as I never did); but where she did not intellectually and morally reign, as Daniel and I together did.
“Now, Robert, I hope you are satisfied. I have told the truth as to an age-long tendency in women ‘to want their home all to themselves.’ But other things and complications there might have been about it, too. I am tired of that subject now, Robert.”
“But just one word. Why should women feel so afflicted about this penury business?”
Althea, for reasons of her own, did not like this following up of this matter, and Ethel took on herself to answer:
“The reason was and is, because the world is the continent of every form of life, knowledge and beauty necessary for all the needs and delights of an intellectualized humanity. So woman’s discontent, anger and unrest at stagnant, self-stultifying conditions, are elements especially serviceable to her less alert and foreseeing companion.”
Adding: “‘The sense of beauty, next to the miraculous, divine suasion, is the means through which HUMAN character is purified and elevated.’”
“I like that answer well,” said Robert. “And I think the power which beauty has over us all makes us more amenable to that ‘miraculous, divine suasion’ through which man is finally purified and elevated.
“Well, that’s finely finished, and I think we are to be congratulated on the success of our attempt at square dealing,” continued Robert. “But you know, Ethel, in the old days you and Daniel had some mysterious talisman by which you discovered if any goddesses came to town in the Civil (?) War-time days, when so many unhappy babies were likely to be neglected. Other kinds than the goddess sort you seemed to think were material not worth your time and attention. I have thought of your way of discriminating then, in association with the amount of time which you blessed souls have since seen fit to give to that Reginald?”