Diogenes.
"This mischief had not then befallen,
And more that shall befell, innumerable
Disturbances on earth through female snares."
It was an excellent fancy of the ancients to make woman the incarnation of original sin,—the tempter and the temptation in one,—a combination of the apple and the serpent. King David, Herod, and even the terrible Bluebeard, might have behaved well in a world without women. It is proverbial that there is no quarrel without a woman in it.
Aristippus. Because, as Steele said, there is nothing else worth quarrelling about.
Hipparchia. Admirable! You remind me of the two shepherds in a pastoral who sing in alternate strains.
"Be mine your tuneful struggle to deride."
You, Diogenes, should recollect that woman is a fact you cannot get rid of, and that the only remedy for your complaints is to improve her condition. And you, Aristippus, like a thousand other sentimental conservatives, cannot hear the suggestion that woman might do something more in this world than she is now doing without giving tongue at once: "Woman's sphere is the home,"—"Woman's mission is to be beautiful, to cheer, and to elevate." Suppose she has no home, and is old and ugly; what then? I know nothing more cheering and elevating than intelligence and efficiency; and I have never heard that either was detrimental to beauty. Is your ideal a woman who is good for nothing?—
"Bred only and completed to the taste
Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,
To dress and troll the tongue and roll the eye"?
Aristippus. Not at all. I believe in the old Roman notion, that woman's domestic honor and chief praise is, Domi mansit, lanam fecit,—with the qualification, that lanam shall not mean worsted-work. I understand the Scriptural word "helpmeet," as applied to wife, in the New England sense of "help." She should, above all, be a creature not too bright and good to know how to prepare and serve up human nature's daily food. I have never seen without emotion the epitaph placed by a high legal dignitary in a neighboring State on the tomb of his first wife:—
"An excellent woman and a good cook."