“It’s not ‘well’ at all,” she cried. She drew herself up from the ground into a kneeling position, which left her sitting on the heels of shoes that could never have been bought in Rocky Springs. “Now, listen to me,” she went on, holding up a warning finger. “I’m just going to state my case right here and now, and—and you’ve got to listen to me. Five years ago, Kate Seton, aged twenty-three, and her sister, Helen Seton, were left orphans, with the sum of two thousand dollars equally divided between them. You get that?”
Her sister nodded amusedly. “Well,” the girl went on deliberately. “Kate Seton was no ordinary sort of girl. Oh, no. She was most unordinary, as Nick would say. She was a sort of headstrong girl with an absurd notion of woman’s independence. I—I don’t mean she was masculine, or any horror like that. But she believed that when it came to doing the things she wanted to do she could do them just as well, and deliberately, as any man. That she could think as well as any man. In fact, she didn’t believe in the superiority of the male sex over hers. The only superiority she did acknowledge was that a man could ask a woman to marry, while the privilege of asking a man was denied to Kate’s sex. But even in acknowledging this she reserved to herself an alternative. She believed that every woman had the right to make a man ask her.”
The patient Kate mildly protested. “You’re making me out a perfectly awful creature,” she said, without the least umbrage. “Hadn’t I better stand up for the—arraignment?”
But her sister’s mock seriousness remained quite undisturbed.
“There’s no necessity,” she said, airily. “Besides, you’ll be tired when I’m through. Now listen. Kate Seton is a very kind and lovable creature—really. Only—only she suffers from—notions.”
The dark-eyed Kate, with her handsome face so full of decision and character, eyed her sister with the indulgence of a mother.
“You do talk, child,” was all she said.
Helen nodded. “I like talking. It makes me feel clever.”
“Ye—es. People are like that,” returned the other ironically. “Go on.”
Helen folded her hands in her lap, and for a moment gazed speculatively at the sister she knew she adored.