“I wish you would.”

They had walked slowly for the last three or four minutes, till they had come to the beginning of the paling in which, a little further on, was the white gate.  They paused here; Frank Sunderline rested his box of tools on the low wall that ran up and joined the fence, and Marion turned and stood with her face toward him in the western light, and her little pink-lined linen sunshade up between her and the low sun,—­between her and the roadway also, down which might come any curious passers-by.

“It seems to me,” said Frank Sunderline, “that women are getting on to the platforms nowadays, not so much for any real errand they have there, as just for the sake of saying, I’m here!  I think it is very much the ‘to be seen of men’ motive,—­the poorest part of women’s characters,—­that plays itself out in this way, as it always has done in dancing and dressing and acting, and what not.  It isn’t that a woman might not be on a platform, if she were called there, as well as anywhere else.  There never was a woman came out before the world in any grand, true way, that she wasn’t all the more honored and attended to because she was a woman.  There are some things too good to be made common; things that ought to be saved up for a special time, so that they may be special.  If it falls to a woman to be a Queen, and to open and dismiss her Parliament, nobody in all the kingdom but thinks the words come nobler and sweeter for a woman’s saying them.  But that’s because she is put there, not because she climbs up some other way.  If a woman honestly has something that she must say—­some great word from the Lord, or for her country, or for suffering people,—­then let her say it; and every real woman’s husband, and every real mother’s son, will hear her with his very heart.  Or if even she has some sure wonderful gift,—­if she can sing, or read, or recite; if she can stir people up to good and beautiful things as one in a thousand, that’s her errand; let her do it, and let the thousand come to hear.  But she ought to be certain sure, or else she’s leaving her real errand behind.  Don’t let everybody, just because the door is open, rush in without any sort of a pass or countersign.  That’s what it’s coming to.  A sham trade, like hundreds of other sham trades; and the shammer and the shamefuller, because women demean themselves to it.  I can’t bear to see women changing so, away from themselves.  We shan’t get them back again, this generation.  The homes are going.  Young men of these days have got to lose their wives—­that they ought to have—­and their homes that they looked forward to, such as their mothers made.  It’s hard upon them; it takes away their hopes and their motives; it’s as bad for them as for the women.  It’s the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place.  There’s no end to the mischief; but it works first and worst with exactly girls of your class—­our class, Marion.  Girls that are all upset out of their natural places, and not really fit for the new things they undertake to do.  As I said,—­how long will it last?  How long will the Mr. Hamilton Leverings put you forward and find chances for you?  Just as long as you are young and pretty and new.  And then, what have you got left?  What are you going to turn round to?”