“But, much as I wonder at the living, I wonder yet more at the dying, or those who are looking forward to their own death. There are men and women who leave fortunes to the already rich, or to institutions which are not in need, or to found or endow libraries which bear their names, while all about them reigns an earthly hell of poverty to which they never give a thought.
“Now and then one hears of something lovely. I remember a man in America who, dying, left money to give a house, an acre of land, and a pension sufficient to live on modestly, to a number of homeless women, single or widows. The only notice I ever saw of that tender and sympathizing remembrance of the homeless called it ‘eccentric.’ Most people who give wish to herd the unfortunate together, making a solid and permanent exposition of their benevolence which they can describe in the newspapers.”
“What are women doing?” Tacita asked. “Some things I saw gave me a troubled feeling. It was so different from our women here, so noble, harmonious and restful as they are!”
“It is, perhaps, inevitable,” Iona said. “I do not like to find fault with my sisters when they strive to be something better than dolls. Every transition state is disagreeable. I hope that, having made the circle, they may come back to a higher plane of the same hemisphere they have occupied in the past. At present many are ruining what they propose to regenerate. Boasting that they will bring back the lost Paradise, they go no farther than Cain, the serpent, and partial nakedness. Woman as a law-maker is meddlesome and tyrannical. She goes too much into detail. There is a pertness and shrillness in their way of bringing in the millennium which irritates my nerves. They won’t let you alone. They nag at you. With some, you cannot speak in their presence without repenting of having opened your mouth. You deplore the evils of society, and they call you a pessimist; you praise the beautiful, the sublime, and discern a rainbow somewhere, and they dub you optimist; you venture to touch on some half possibility of intimations reaching the living from the dead, and they pin ‘Spiritist’ on your shawl; you surmise that we cannot be sure that we are to live only one life upon the earth, and they discover that you are are a Theosophist, and make remarks about your Karma. They have a mania brought from their jam-pots for labeling things. It is a relief to turn from them and talk with a sensible man whose ideas are more in the affresco style, and do not scratch.
“And then, on some happy day you meet a woman, the woman, noble, judicial, kind, courageous, modest and sympathizing, and you fall at her feet.”
“I think that something ideal may result from this uprising of women,” said Dylar. “It is crude now, as you say. But when they shall have shown what they can do, they will voluntarily return, the mothers among them, to their quiet homes, and say to man, ‘As we were before, we could not help making many of you worthless. Now we are going to make a race of noble men. We will rule the state through the cradle.’”
“Like our Tacita,” said Iona with a smile. “Elena always said that she was fit to rule a state.”
“Dear Elena!” said Dylar’s wife. “I am so impatient to see her. It will be delightful to have you both here together, if but for a day.”
For Elena was on her way to San Salvador, and near; and they meant to keep her. She had had enough of travel and unassisted labor; and she was needed at home.
“Do you see how our little palm-trees grow?” Tacita asked. “We are going to have them set in the green of the Basilica, after all. They will be ready in the autumn.”