"You see," said Eva, laughing, "I make our Doctor useful on the Fourier principle. He is dying to get at those magazine articles, so I let him cut the leaves and take a peep along here and there, but I forbid reading—in our presence, men have got to give over absorbing, and begin radiating. Doesn't St. Paul say, Mr. St. John, that if women are to learn anything they are to ask their husbands at home? and doesn't that imply that their husbands at home are to talk to them, and not sit reading newspapers?"
"I confess I never thought of that inference from the passage," said Mr. St. John, smiling.
"But the modern woman," said Dr. Campbell, "scorns to ask her husband at home. She holds that her husband should ask her."
"Oh, well, I am not the modern woman. I go for the old boundaries and the old privileges of my sex; and besides, I am a good church woman and prefer to ask my husband. But I insist, as a necessary consequence, that he must hear me and answer me, as he cannot do if he is reading newspapers or magazines. Isn't that case fairly argued, Mr. St. John?"
"I don't see but it is."
"Well, then, the spirit of it applies to the whole of your cultured and instructive sex. Men, in the presence of women, ought always to be prepared to give them information, to answer questions, and make themselves generally entertaining and useful."
"You see, Mr. St. John," said Dr. Campbell, "that Mrs. Henderson has a dangerous facility for generalizing. Set her to interpreting and there's no saying where her inferences mightn't run."
"I'd almost release Mr. St. John from my rules, to allow him to look over this article of yours, though, Dr. Campbell," said Eva. "Harry has read it to me, and I said, along in different parts of it, if ministers only knew these things, how much good they might do!"
"What is the article?"