"Permit me," he began sneeringly, "to beg you to inform me, Fräulein von Hartwich,--I ask solely for instruction in the matter,--what possible scientific interest the fact that a woman spoke several languages--she could hardly have spoken all, as you declared--could possess."
"Yes, I too am curious upon that point!" cried Moritz.
Ernestine looked gravely from one to the other. "I am quite ready to explain it to you. I should not, indeed, have ventured to do so if you had not asked me, for it would have seemed to me insulting to suppose that you could need any such explanation."
"That shot told," Moritz remarked comically.
"We are foes, gentlemen, and I am bent upon victory," said Ernestine. "I think the facility of acquisition shown by Dorothea Rodde is certainly as significant a fact in natural history as any example of extraordinary instinct in animals, for which zoologists search so untiringly. Or is the natural history of women less interesting than that of the ape?"
"We are not used to compare or to speak of women thus," Möllner interposed.
"Then, if you really accord us an equality with men in the scale of creation, Dorothea's eminent talent must certainly be of scientific interest, because it must assist in the investigation of the relative weight of the masculine and feminine brain,--a point not yet solved, the social importance of which is not recognized, or it would not be treated with such frivolous indifference. I, gentlemen, am convinced that the great contest for the emancipation of woman can be settled only through physiology, since that alone can prove whether the material conditions of the thinking mechanism are equal in men and women; and, if they are, who would deny a woman the right to assert her independence of man, even in the world of the intellect?"
"But we have not yet reached this point," said Johannes. "This equality has not yet been proved."
"Nor has the contrary," said Ernestine. "Therefore it seems to me that it would be well worth while for physiology to come to the aid of history, and test the material brain of famous women."
"And what end would that serve?"