The parson.  So am I.

Our next door.  I tried a Sunday-school book once; but I made the good boy end in the poorhouse, and the bad boy go to Congress; and the publisher said it wouldn’t do, the public wouldn’t stand that sort of thing.  Nobody but the good go to Congress.

The mistress.  Herbert, what do you think women are good for?

Our next door.  That’s a poser.

Herbert.  Well, I think they are in a tentative state as to literature, and we cannot yet tell what they will do.  Some of our most brilliant books of travel, correspondence, and writing on topics in which their sympathies have warmly interested them, are by women.  Some of them are also strong writers in the daily journals.

Mandeville.  I ’m not sure there’s anything a woman cannot do as well as a man, if she sets her heart on it.

The parson.  That’s because she’s no conscience.

Chorus.  O Parson!

The parson.  Well, it does n’t trouble her, if she wants to do anything.  She looks at the end, not the means.  A woman, set on anything, will walk right through the moral crockery without wincing.  She’d be a great deal more unscrupulous in politics than the average man.  Did you ever see a female lobbyist?  Or a criminal?  It is Lady Macbeth who does not falter.  Don’t raise your hands at me!  The sweetest angel or the coolest devil is a woman.  I see in some of the modern novels we have been talking of the same unscrupulous daring, a blindness to moral distinctions, a constant exaltation of a passion into a virtue, an entire disregard of the immutable laws on which the family and society rest.  And you ask lawyers and trustees how scrupulous women are in business transactions!

The fire-tender.  Women are often ignorant of affairs, and, besides, they may have a notion often that a woman ought to be privileged more than a man in business matters; but I tell you, as a rule, that if men would consult their wives, they would go a deal straighter in business operations than they do go.

The parson.  We are all poor sinners.  But I’ve another indictment against the women writers.  We get no good old-fashioned love-stories from them.  It’s either a quarrel of discordant natures one a panther, and the other a polar bear—­for courtship, until one of them is crippled by a railway accident; or a long wrangle of married life between two unpleasant people, who can neither live comfortably together nor apart.  I suppose, by what I see, that sweet wooing, with all its torturing and delightful uncertainty, still goes on in the world; and I have no doubt that the majority of married people live more happily than the unmarried.  But it’s easier to find a dodo than a new and good love-story.

Mandeville.  I suppose the old style of plot is exhausted.  Everything in man and outside of him has been turned over so often that I should think the novelists would cease simply from want of material.