Lady Smart. Have a care, child! Already you simper like a furmety kettle, and slop over like an ill-made junket. Soon you'll be as smug and self-conscious as a new member of "The Souls," if you be not watchful.
Miss Notable. Well, but now the men are away, what really think you, entre nous, of the New Woman movement?
Lady Answerall. Why, that 'tis older than Mary Woolstonecroft, and, in fact, originated about the time when Eve took the first bite at the first apple.
Miss Notable. Heigho! 'Tis fine to sit here in the Shades, and say so; but I own I should like well enough to ruffle it in new-fangled clubs and select coteries, to be the talk of the town as Aphra Behn was, only in the irreproachable company of popular savants and Bishops' sons; to see my niminy-piminy neuroticisms go into their tenth edition, have my anti-matrimonial mouthings discussed in monthly magazines and religious newspapers, and—have a free slap at the monster, Man, whose best voluntary treatment of us means, at bottom, nothing better than a golden cage and a silken gag.
Lady Sparkish. "Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em!"—as the Dean said concerning Chief Justice Whitshed's coach-motto.
Miss Notable. Humph! Did he not also say, in dealing with The Furniture of a Woman's Mind—
"For conversation well endued
She calls it witty to be rude"?
Lady Sparkish. What do you mean, Miss?
Miss Notable. Ha! ha! ha! Not much. But, as Lady Answerall used to say, when we had a dish of tea and tittle-tattle together in the sweet, solid, wicked, bewitching old modish days, "You know I'm old Tell-truth, and love to call a spade a spade."
Lady Sparkish. Oh, I see. As the dear old Dean also said—