ith the Sacred Record. But
perhaps there is some way of reconciling them, as there is of making the
seven days of creation harmonize with modern geology. At least, these
speculations are curious enough in themselves; and I have seen so many
good and handsome children come of parents who were anything but virtuous
and comely, that I can believe in almost any amount of improvement taking
place in a tribe of living beings, if time and opportunity favor it. I
have read in books of natural history that dogs came originally from
wolves. When I remember my little Flora, who, as I used to think, could
do everything but talk, it does not seem to me that she was much nearer
her savage ancestors than some of the horrid cannibal wretches are to
their neighbors the great apes.

You see that I am tolerably liberal in my habit of looking at all these
questions. We women drift along with the current of the times,
listening, in our quiet way, to the discussions going on round us in
books and in conversation, and shift the phrases in which we think and
talk with something of the same ease as that with which we change our
style of dress from year to year. I doubt if you of the other sex know
what an effect this habit of accommodating our tastes to changing
standards has upon us. Nothing is fixed in them, as you know; the very
law of fashion is change. I suspect we learn from our dressmakers to
shift the costume of our minds, and slip on the new fashions of thinking
all the more easily because we have been accustomed to new styles of
dressing every season.

It frightens me to see how much I have written without having yet said a
word of what I began this letter on purpose to say. I have taken so much
space in "defining my position," to borrow the politicians' phrase, that
I begin to fear you will be out of patience before you come to the part
of my letter I care most about your reading.

What I want to say is this. When these matters are talked about before
persons of different ages and various shades of intelligence, I think one
ought to be very careful that his use of language does not injure the
sensibilities, perhaps blunt the reverential feelings, of those who are
listening to him. You of the sterner sex say that we women have
intuitions, but not logic, as our birthright. I shall not commit my sex
by conceding this to be true as a whole, but I will accept the first half
of it, and I will go so far as to say that we do not