"If that is the case," said Moreton, "if I were a woman I should try and not marry."
Miss Crabb laughed.
"Oh, I presume there will always be a majority of fools among us," she replied. "Silly girls and restless spinsters, ready to be martyred for the mere romance of the thing; but you know, as well as I, that this is an awfully one-sided world."
"Yes, but you women make it so, don't you know, by decoying us over to your side, thus destroying the equilibrium. If we were the antipodes of each other, now, this would be a gloriously balanced world! All the sorrow-making material on one side and all the joy-bringers on the other!"
"You are like the rest—you won't condescend to sensibly argue a question with a woman. You must go off into badinage, as if a woman could not understand and enjoy cogent reasoning. I don't like insincerity, Mr. Moreton."
"I beg a thousand pardons," he exclaimed. "I did not mean to be insincere—indeed, Miss Crabb, I was under the impression that I was making myself quite entertaining, don't you know, I——"
She laughed again, a clear, honest, prairie laugh, throwing back her head and holding up one hand as if to ward off something.
"Oh, it's the same thing over and over. Wherever I go men look upon me as a sort of monstrosity at large by some accident, because I travel alone, just as a man may, and because I attend to my business, just as a man does. It's really funny sometimes; I overhear what they say. They comment on me. 'A cheeky old girl,' 'a newspaper crank,' 'a stiff-minded female,' and 'a meddling nuisance,' are the delicate and friendly epithets applied to me by men. One fellow at the Cincinnati convention called me 'a bag of gimlets' to my face."
"But then your absolute knowledge that the man was mistaken must have ruined the point of his remark," said Moreton. "Conscious innocence is an impenetrable shield."
She looked up at him with a flash of momentary anger in her eyes, then laughing again she said: