“How I should like to fight my way in the world as you are doing! But a woman can do nothing to raise herself. Isn't it hard? Whatever the place where she was born in, she must remain there all her days. She can see her brothers rise, and her friends perhaps, but she must remain below. Isn't it a pity? It isn't that she wants to be rich or great. No, not that; only she doesn't want to be left behind by the people she likes. She must be, though, and just because she's a woman. I'm sure it's so in the Isle of Man, anyway. Isn't it cruel?”
“But aren't you forgetting something?” said Philip.
“Yes?”
“If a woman can't rise of herself because the doors of life are locked to her, it is always possible for a man to raise her.”
“Some one who loves her, you mean, and so lifts her to his own level, and takes her up with him as he goes up?”
“Why not?” said Philip.
Kate's eyes beamed like sunshine. “That is lovely,” she said in a low voice. “Do you know, I never thought of that before! If it were my case, I should like that best of all. Side by side with him, and he doing all? Oh, that is beautiful!”
And she gazed up with a timid joy at the inventive being who had thought of this as at something supernatural.
Cæsar and Grannie came back, both in fearful outbursts of Sunday clothes. Nevertheless Cæsar's eyes, after the first salutation with Philip, fixed themselves on Kate's unfamliar costume.
“Such worldly attire!” he muttered, following the girl round the kitchen and blowing up his black gloves. “This caring for the miserable body that will one day be lowered into the grave! What does the Book say?—put my tall hat on the clane laff, Nancy. 'Let it not be the outward adorning of putting on of apparel, but let it be the hidden man of the heart.'”