“You mean he would listen to my ideas and take my advice—you mean he wants a wife who will be his equal, a sort of partner?”
“Of course. What else is a wife? He would like nothing better than to have you give him American ideas.”
“But I thought a woman had no rights at all, here.”
“How absurd! She has all the rights that a man has.”
“But women aren’t in the tribal councils?”
“They are when it’s a council of the whole tribe. They aren’t chiefs, no. But chiefs always talk things over with their wives.”
“But women are bought and sold. You just said so. Didn’t you say you were offered twenty thousand kronen for me?”
“It’s an unusual situation. Here you are, without a family; I’m the only man in the party; naturally he thinks of me as in the position of a brother or a father. The man’s family always pays money to the girl’s family before a marriage, but the girl isn’t sold; she’s been betrothed in her childhood, for any number of reasons. The money the man pays is spent for the girl’s clothes and household things.”
“Then you’d be supposed to give me the twenty thousand kronen? And then it would be his again, after all.”
“Of course not. It’s yours, isn’t it? No one has any right to a woman’s personal belongings, except her.”