Mandeville.  That is the sort of enterprise the women are engaged in, the frustration of the criminal tendencies of those born in vice.  I believe women have it in their power to regenerate the world morally.

The parson.  It’s time they began to undo the mischief of their mother.

The mistress.  The reason they have not made more progress is that they have usually confined their individual efforts to one man; they are now organizing for a general campaign.

The fire-tender.  I’m not sure but here is where the ameliorations of the conditions of life, which are called the comforts of this civilization, come in, after all, and distinguish the age above all others.  They have enabled the finer powers of women to have play as they could not in a ruder age.  I should like to live a hundred years and see what they will do.

Herbert.  Not much but change the fashions, unless they submit themselves to the same training and discipline that men do.

I have no doubt that Herbert had to apologize for this remark afterwards in private, as men are quite willing to do in particular cases; it is only in general they are unjust.  The talk drifted off into general and particular depreciation of other times.  Mandeville described a picture, in which he appeared to have confidence, of a fight between an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus, where these huge iron-clad brutes were represented chewing up different portions of each other’s bodies in a forest of the lower cretaceous period.  So far as he could learn, that sort of thing went on unchecked for hundreds of thousands of years, and was typical of the intercourse of the races of man till a comparatively recent period.  There was also that gigantic swan, the Plesiosaurus; in fact, all the early brutes were disgusting.  He delighted to think that even the lower animals had improved, both in appearance and disposition.

The conversation ended, therefore, in a very amicable manner, having been taken to a ground that nobody knew anything about.

NINTH STUDY

I

Can you have a backlog in July?  That depends upon circumstances.

In northern New England it is considered a sign of summer when the housewives fill the fireplaces with branches of mountain laurel, and, later, with the feathery stalks of the asparagus.  This is often, too, the timid expression of a tender feeling, under Puritanic repression, which has not sufficient vent in the sweet-william and hollyhock at the front door.  This is a yearning after beauty and ornamentation which has no other means of gratifying itself.