"Fred, you'll discover the Ten Commandments next. It's the same old result, only you call it by a different name. But go ahead; run the universe! I don't care what kind of oil you use, so long as the gears don't stick."
Mr. Weston's metaphors confessed the fact that he had achieved a motor so that he might go thirty miles for a cup of tea. He used to come out to the camp two or three times a week, and, shading his eyes from the magenta lamp-shade, and the frieze of Japanese fans, and the yellow "Votes for Women" flags, listen dreamily to Fred's theories for the running of the universe, and also to that paper on which she was so hard at work. She wanted his criticism, she said, but, of course, what she really wanted was his praise. She got it—meagerly, and with so many qualifications that, when all was said, it hardly seemed like praise at all. That he was doing his best to make her carry her little torch so that it might shed its glimmer of light, yet not set things on fire, never occurred to her. If it had, she would have resented it hotly. As it was, his temperance never checked her vehemence, but neither did it irritate her. Her arrogant and shallow certainties, on the contrary, did occasionally irritate him, and, of course, they never brought him any conviction; but they did oblige him to be intellectually candid with himself, and his candor brought him to the point of telling her that he thought her generation better than his, because it was not afraid of Truth. "So, perhaps you women may save civilization," he said.
"Hooray!" said Fred.
"Hold on," he told her, dryly; "cheers are premature. What I mean is that feminism, with its hideously bad taste and its demand for Truth, is here, whether we like it or not! It may make the world over, or it may send us all on the rocks."
"Nonsense!"
"The hope in it is your brand-new sense of social responsibility. The menace is your conceited individualism."
"Of course you are not conceited yourself," she said, sweetly.
"I wish you wouldn't interrupt me! I concede that your sense of responsibility needs the tool of the ballot, just as a farmer needs a spade when he wants to raise a crop of potatoes. That is why I am compelled to call myself a suffragist."
"Hooray!" she said again.
He looked at her drolly. "It's queer about you—not you, but your sex; you are mentally, but not emotionally, interesting. You are not nearly as charming as the ladies of my youth; you have no sense of proportion, and you jolt the life out of a man, by trying to jump the track the minute you get tired of the scenery. Also you are occasionally boring. But you can't help that; you are reformers."