THE CALL TO ARMS
Both Randolph, and Carolina were deeply affected by their father's words.
The daughter attempted to take on herself the blame for her brother's action.
"I was the older one. I might have stopped him if I had wished, and should bear the burden."
"No, no, father," exclaimed the youth, his inborn self-reliance prompting him to shoulder the consequences of his own mistakes. "I, and I alone, am responsible for what I did. I did not realize that it was wrong. I will not hide behind Carolina."
Carolina Langdon bore herself better than was to have been expected under the strain of the painful interview. She saw more clearly now how she had erred. She was undergoing an inward revolution that would make it impossible for her ever again to veer so far from the line of duty to her father, her family and to herself.
When Randolph had finished Carolina took up her own defense, and eloquently she pleaded the defense of many a woman who yearns for what she has not got, for what may be beyond her reach—the defense of the woman who chafes under the limitations of worldly position, of sex and of opportunity. It was the defense of an ambitious woman.
"Perhaps I ought to have been a man of the Langdon family," she exclaimed. "Father, oh, can't you understand that I couldn't doze my life away down on those plantations? You don't know what ambition is. I had to have the world. I had to have money. If I had been a man I would have tried big financial enterprises. I should have liked to fight for a fortune. You wouldn't have condemned me then. You might have said my methods were bold, but if I succeeded I would have been a great man. But just because I am a woman you think I must sit home with my knitting. No, father, the world does move. Women must have an equal chance with men, but I wish I had been a man!"
"Even then I hope you would have been a gentleman," rebuked her father sternly. "Women should have an equal chance, Carolina. They should have an equal chance for the same virtues as men, not for the same vices."
"But an equal chance," returned the girl fervidly. "There, father, you have admitted what I have tried to prove. The woman with the spirit of a man, the spirit that cries to a woman. 'Advance,' 'Accomplish,' 'Be something,' 'Strike for yourself,' cannot sit idly by while all the world moves on. If it is true that I have chosen the wrong means, the wrong way, to better my lot I did it through ignorance, and that ignorance is the fault of the times in which I live, of the system that guides the era in which I live.