I feel as if it were right to ask her as often as I can if she doesn’t consider every one equal; but she always says she doesn’t, and she confesses that she doesn’t think she is equal to “Lady Something-or-other,” who is the wife of that relation of her father.  I try and persuade her all I can that she is; but it seems as if she didn’t want to be persuaded; and when I ask her if Lady So-and-so is of the same opinion (that Miss Vane isn’t her equal), she looks so soft and pretty with her eyes, and says, “Of course she is!” When I tell her that this is right down bad for Lady So-and-so, it seems as if she wouldn’t believe me, and the only answer she will make is that Lady So-and-so is “extremely nice.”  I don’t believe she is nice at all; if she were nice, she wouldn’t have such ideas as that.  I tell Miss Vane that at Bangor we think such ideas vulgar; but then she looks as though she had never heard of Bangor.  I often want to shake her, though she is so sweet.  If she isn’t angry with the people who make her feel that way, I am angry for her.  I am angry with her brother too, for she is evidently very much afraid of him, and this gives me some further insight into the subject.  She thinks everything of her brother, and thinks it natural that she should be afraid of him, not only physically (for this is natural, as he is enormously tall and strong, and has very big fists), but morally and intellectually.  She seems unable, however, to take in any argument, and she makes me realise what I have often heard—­that if you are timid nothing will reason you out of it.

Mr. Vane, also (the brother), seems to have the same prejudices, and when I tell him, as I often think it right to do, that his sister is not his subordinate, even if she does think so, but his equal, and, perhaps in some respects his superior, and that if my brother, in Bangor, were to treat me as he treates this poor young girl, who has not spirit enough to see the question in its true light, there would be an indignation, meeting of the citizens to protest against such an outrage to the sanctity of womanhood—­when I tell him all this, at breakfast or dinner, he bursts out laughing so loud that all the plates clatter on the table.

But at such a time as this there is always one person who seems interested in what I say—­a German gentleman, a professor, who sits next to me at dinner, and whom I must tell you more about another time.  He is very learned, and has a great desire for information; he appreciates a great many of my remarks, and after dinner, in the salon, he often comes to me to ask me questions about them.  I have to think a little, sometimes, to know what I did say, or what I do think.  He takes you right up where you left off; and he is almost as fond of discussing things as William Platt is.  He is splendidly educated, in the German style, and he told me the other day that he was an “intellectual broom.”  Well, if he is, he sweeps clean; I told him that.  After he