“Upon my word, Carl,” says Clara, “I think you put the stars to base uses when you set them to gambling in stocks. Have you told Captain Cary of our projected sail down the bay?”
“Poor Clara!” Melicent said, joining them. “We are planning some little pleasure-trip to distract her mind. You do not know, perhaps, that the Philistines are upon her?”
The sailor did not understand, but looked so inquiring and solicitous that Clara explained to him.
“I published a story ages ago,” she said, “and the editor of the
Cosmic has just become aware of it. He found it lately among the débris of his writing-table. The authoress, he says, has shaken up a few fancies in a kaleidoscope, and calls them life. They are about as much like life, he adds, as Watteau’s shepherdesses are like real shepherdesses, or as Marie Antoinette’s housekeeping at the Petit Trianon, with ribbons tied round the handles of silver saucepans, was like real kitchen-work. Still, he concludes, the story is amusing, in spite of its pinchbeck ideal, and, when the writer is older, she will, doubtless, do better. The musty old metaphysician!” exclaimed Miss Clara, warming with the subject. “I once read a paragraph in one of his articles, and found it comical. I had never seen any of the words before, except the articles and prepositions. My first impression was that he had made them up, for fun. I found them all out in the unabridged dictionary, though. They were real words, but I have forgotten what they mean.”
“So much the better!” said Melicent. And then followed a controversy on the subject of learned women. Melicent denounced them as unwomanly; but Melicent was neither a student nor well read, and there might be a difference of opinion as to cause and effect in her case. Mr. Yorke mocked les savantes; but Mr. Yorke adored a wife whose literary acquirements were of the most modest kind, and he had once, in a never-forgotten argument, been worsted by a clever woman. Captain Cary was of opinion that clever and learned women were not fit wives for common men. At that, Clara took up the gauntlet with great spirit.
Clever women did not wish to marry common men, she said. And there were plenty of uncommon men
who were not jealous of them. She disliked all this hypocritical talk about the beauty of simplicity and humility and submission in women. The real meaning of it was not Christian, but Mohammedan.
“For me,” Mrs. Yorke interposed, “I think that some women should be learned, in order to appreciate learned men. If the wife of a scholar could not understand and sympathize in her husband’s love of books and what they teach, she would soon grow jealous of them, and he would miss what should be his sweetest homage.”
“Now, is not there an orthodox woman?” Mr. Yorke exclaimed with delight. “The sole use she can conceive of a woman’s having for learning is that she may be better able to appreciate her husband.”