“That’s a nice principle!” said Marion.  “I like that I should like to be paid for what I might be good for!”

Frank Sunderline laughed.

“It’s a good principle; because by it things settle themselves, in the long run.  You may take mahogany or pine to make a table, and one will answer the common convenience of a table as well as the other; but you will learn not to take mahogany when the pine will serve the purpose.  You will keep it for what the pine wouldn’t be fit for; which wouldn’t come to pass if the pine weren’t cheapest.  Women wouldn’t get those places to tend counters and keep books, if the world hadn’t found out that it was poor economy, as a general rule, to take men for it.”

“But what do you say about mental power?  About pay for teaching, for instance?” asked Ray.

“Why, you’re coming round to my side!” exclaimed Marion.  “I should really like to know where you are?”

“I am wherever I can get nearest to the truth of things,” said Ray, smiling.

“That,” said Sunderline, “is one of the specialties that is getting righted.  Women are being paid more, in proportion, for intellectual service, and the nearer you come to the pure mental power, the nearer you come to equality in recompense.  A woman who writes a clever book, or paints a good picture, or sculptures a good statue, can get as much for her work as a man.  But where time is paid for,—­where it is personal service,—­the old principle at the root of things comes in.  Men open up the wildernesses, men sail the seas, work the mines, forge the iron, build the cities, defend the nations while they grow, do the physical work of the world, make way for all the finishings of education and opportunity that come afterward, and that put women where they are to-day.  And men must be counted for such things.  It is man’s work that has made these women’s platforms.  They have the capital of strength, and capital draws interest.  The right of the strongest isn’t necessarily oppression by the strongest.  That’s the way I look at it.  And I think that what women lose in claim they gain in privilege.”

“Only when women come to knock about the world without any claims, they don’t seem to get much privilege,” said Marion.

“I don’t know.  It seems rude to say so, perhaps, but they find a world ready made to knock round in, don’t they?  And it is because there’s so much done that they couldn’t have done themselves, that they find the chances waiting for them that they do.  And the chances are multiplying with civilization, all the time.  You see the question really goes back to first conditions, and lies upon the fact that first conditions may come back any day,—­do come back, here and there, continually.  Put man and woman together on the primitive earth, and it is the man that has got to subdue it; the woman is what Scripture calls her,—­the helpmeet.  And my notion is that if everything was right, a woman never should have to ’knock round alone.’  It isn’t the real order of Providence.  I think Providence has been very much interfered with.”