Mary turned the pages in a helpless sort of way.
"You'll have to explain some of this," she said at last. But before giving it back to him she looked out of the window for a time—one of her slow, thoughtful glances—and added, "I wonder why girls aren't brought up to know something about business—the way boys are."
"Perhaps it's because they have no head for business."
She thought that over.
"Can you speak French?" she suddenly asked.
"No."
"…I can. I can speak it, and read it, and write it, and think it…. Now don't you think that if a girl can do that—if she can learn thousands and thousands of new words, how to pronounce them, and spell them, and parse them, and inflect them—how to supply hundreds of rules of grammar—and if she can learn to do this so well that she can chat away in French without giving it a thought—don't you think she might be able to learn something about the language and rules of business, too, if they were only taught to her? Then perhaps there wouldn't be so many helpless widows in the world, as you said just now, at the mercy of the first glib sharper who comes along."
This time it was the judge's turn to think it over.
"You're an exceptional girl, Mary," he said at last.
"No, really I'm not," she earnestly told him. "Any girl can learn anything that a boy can learn—if she is only given a chance. Where boys and girls go to school together—at the grammar schools and high schools—the girls are just as quick as the boys, and their average marks are quite as high. It was true at college, too. The girls could learn anything that the men could learn—and do it just as well."