“You have only half an hour, my dears!” counselled Mrs Girdwood, to stimulate the girls towards getting ready.
Cornelia, who occupied the chair, rose to her feet, laying aside the crochet on which she had been engaged, and going off to be dressed by Keziah.
Julia, on the sofa, simply yawned.
Only at a third admonition from her mother, she flung the French novel she had been reading upon the floor, and sat up.
“Bother the gentlemen?” she exclaimed, repeating the yawn with arms upraised. “I wish, ma, you hadn’t asked them to come. I’d rather have stayed in all day, and finished that beautiful story I’ve got into. Heaven bless that dear Georges Sand! Woman that she is, she should have been a man. She knows them as if she were one; their pretensions and treachery. Oh, mother! when you were determined on having a child, why did you make it a daughter? I’d give the world to have been your son!”
“Fie, fie, Jule! Don’t let any one hear you talk in that silly way!”
“I don’t care whether they do or not. I don’t care if all Paris, all France, all the world knows it. I want to be a man, and to have a man’s power.”
“Pff, child! A man’s power! There’s no such thing in existence, only in outward show. It has never been exerted, without a woman’s will at the back of it. That is the source of all power.”
The storekeeper’s relict was reasoning from experience. She knew whose will had made her the mistress of a house in the Fifth Avenue; and given her scores, hundreds, of other advantages, she had never credited to the sagacity of her husband.
“To be a woman,” she continued, “one who knows man and how to manage him, that is enough for me. Ah! Jule, if I’d only had your opportunities, I might this day have been anything.”