worth remembering, and a general sense of having been full of bad feelings.'
'No enjoyment?' he asked in surprise.
'Only by the merest chance and exception,' she answered, surprised at his surprise; 'what is there to enjoy?'
The peculiar-looking clergyman might have seemed more likely to ask such a question than the beautiful girl, but he looked at her anxiously and said, 'Don't nourish morbid dislike and contempt, my dear Lena, it is not a safeguard. There are such things as perilous reactions. Try to weigh justly, and be grateful for kindness, and to like what is likeable.'
At that moment, after what had been an interval of weary famine to all but these two, host and hostess appeared, the lady as usual, picturesque, though in the old black silk, with a Roman sash tied transversely, and holly in her hair; and gaily shaking hands- 'That's right, Lady Rosamond; so you are trusted here! Your husband hasn't sent you to represent him?'
'I'm afraid his confidence in me did not go so far,' said Rosamond.
'Ah! I see-Lady Tyrrell, how d'ye do-you've brought Lena? Well, Rector, are you prepared?'
'That depends on what you expect of me.'
'Have you the convinceable spot in your mind?'
'We must find it. It is very uncommon, and indurates very soon, so we had better make the most of our opportunity,' said the American lady, who had entered as resplendent as before, though in so different a style that Rosamond wondered how such a wardrobe could be carried about the world; and the sporting friend muttered, 'Stunning! she has been making kickshaws all day, and looks as if she came out of a bandbox! If all women were like that, it might pay.'
It was true. Mrs. Tallboys was one of those women of resource whose practical powers may well inspire the sense of superiority, and with the ease and confidence of her country.
The meal was a real success. That some portion had been procured, ready dressed, at Backsworth, was evident, but all that had been done at home had a certain piquant Transatlantic flavour, in which the American Muse could be detected; and both she and her husband were polished, lively, and very agreeable, in spite of the twang in their voices. Miss Moy, the Captain and his friend, talked horses at one end of the table, and Rosamond faltered her woman's horror for the rights of her sex, increased by this supposed instance.
When the ladies rose at dessert, Mrs. Duncombe summoned him: 'Come, Rector!-come, Professor! you're not to sit over your wine.'
'We rise so far above the ordinary level of manhood!' said Julius, obediently rising.
'Once for all, Mr. Charnock,' said Mrs. Duncombe, turning on him with flashing eyes and her Elizabethan majesty, 'if you come prepared to scoff, we can have nothing to do with you.'
Rosamond's eyes looked mischievous, and her brow cocked, but Julius answered in earnest, 'Really, I assure you I have not come in a spirit of sarcasm; I am honestly desirous of hearing your arguments.'
'Shall I stay in your stead?' added Miss Moy. 'They'll be much more amusing here!'
'Come, Gussie, you're on your good behaviour,' said Mrs. Duncombe. 'Bob kept you to learn the right way of making a sensation.'
As they entered the drawing-room two more guests arrived, namely, Joanna Bowater, and Herbert, who walked in with a kind of grim submission, till he saw Lady Tyrrell, when he lighted up, and, on a little gracious gesture with her hand, he sat down on the sofa beside her; and was there solaced by an occasional remark in an undertone; for indeed the boy was always in a trance wherever she was, and she had a fair amount of by-play wherewith to entertain herself and him during the discussion.
'You are just in time, Jenny,' said Rosamond; 'the great question is going to be started.'
'And it is-?'
'The Equality of the Sexes,' pronounced Mrs. Duncombe.
'Ex cathedra?' said Julius, as the graceful Muse seated herself in a large red arm-chair. 'This scene is not an easy one in which to dispute it.'
'You see, Bessie,' said Mrs. Tallboys, 'that men are so much afraid of the discussion that they try to elude it with empty compliment under which is couched a covert sneer.'
'Perhaps,' returned Julius, 'we might complain that we can't open our lips without compliments and sneers being detected when we were innocent of both.'
'Were you?' demanded Mrs. Tallboys.
'Honestly, I was looking round and thinking the specimens before us would tell in your favour.'
'What a gallant parson!' cried Miss Moy.
But a perfect clamour broke out from others.
'Julius, that's too bad! when you know-'
'Mr Charnock, you are quite mistaken. Bob is much cleverer than I, in his own line-'
'Quite true, Rector,' affirmed Herbert; 'Joan has more brains than all the rest of us-for a woman, I mean.'
'For a woman!' repeated Mrs. Tallboys. 'Let a human being do or be what she will, it is disposed of in a moment by that one verdict, 'Very well for a woman!''
'How is it with the decision of posterity?' said Jenny. 'Can you show any work of woman of equal honour and permanence with that of men?'
'Because her training has been sedulously inferior.'
'Not always,' said Jenny; 'not in Italy in the cinque cento, nor in England under Elizabeth.'
'Yes, and there were names-!'
'Names, yes, but that is all. The lady's name is remembered for the curiosity of her having equalled the ordinary poet or artist of her time, but her performances either are lost or only known to curious scholars. They have not the quality which makes things permanent.'
'What do you say to Sappho?'
'There is nothing of her but a name, and fragments that curious scholars read.'
'Worse luck to her if she invented Sapphics,' added Herbert.
'One of womankind's torments for mankind, eh?' said his neighbour.
'And there are plenty more such,' asserted Mrs. Duncombe, boldly (for these were asides). 'It is only that one can't recollect-and the men have suppressed them.'
'I think men praised them,' said Jenny, 'and that we remember the praise, not the works. For instance, Roswitha, or Olympia Morata, or Vittoria Colonna. Vittoria's sonnets are extant, but we only value them as being hers, more for what she
'And,' added Eleonora, 'men did not suppress Hannah More, or Joanna Baillie. You know Scott thought Miss Baillie's dramas would rank with Shakespeare's.'
Mrs. Tallboys was better read in logic and mathematics than in history, and did not follow Jenny, but she turned her adversary's argument to her own advantage, by exclaiming, 'Are the gentlemen present familiar with these bright lights?'
'I confess my ignorance of some of them,' said Julius.
'But my youngest brother knows all that,' said Rosamond at a brave venture.
'Macaulay's school-boy,' murmured Lady Tyrrell, softly.
'Let us return to the main point,' said Mrs. Tallboys, a little annoyed. 'It is of the present and future that I would speak, not of the past.'
'Does not the past give the only data on which to form a conclusion?' said Julius.
'Certainly not. The proposition is not what a woman or two in her down-trodden state may have exceptionally effected, but her natural equality, and in fact superiority, in all but the physical strength which has imposed an unjust bondage on the higher nature.'
'I hardly know where to meet you if you reject all arguments from proved facts,' said Julius.
'And the Bible. Why don't you say the Bible?' exclaimed his wife in an undertone; but Mrs. Tallboys took it up and said, 'The precepts of Scripture are founded on a state of society passed away. You may find arguments for slavery there.'
'I doubt that,' said Julius. 'There are practical directions for an existing state of things, which have been distorted into sanction for its continuance. The actual precepts are broad principles, which are for all times, and
