ngdon bore herself better than was to have been expected
under the strain of the painful interview. She saw more clearly now
how she had erred. She was undergoing an inward revolution that would
make it impossible for her ever again to veer so far from the line of
duty to her father, her family and to herself.

When Randolph had finished Carolina took up her own defense, and
eloquently she pleaded the defense of many a woman who yearns for what
she has not got, for what may be beyond her reach--the defense of the
woman who chafes under the limitations of worldly position, of sex and
of opportunity. It was the defense of an ambitious woman.

"Perhaps I ought to have been a man of the Langdon family," she
exclaimed. "Father, oh, can't you understand that I couldn't doze my
life away down on those plantations? You don't know what ambition is.
I had to have the world. I had to have money. If I had been a man I
would have tried big financial enterprises. I should have liked to
fight for a fortune. You wouldn't have condemned me then. You might
have said my methods were bold, but if I succeeded I would have been
a great man. But just because I am a woman you think I must sit home
with my knitting. No, father, the world does move. Women must have an
equal chance with men, but I wish I had been a man!"

"Even then I hope you would have been a gentleman," rebuked her father
sternly. "Women should have an equal chance, Carolina. They should
have an equal chance for the same virtues as men, not for the same
vices."

"But an equal chance," returned the girl fervidly. "There, father, you
have admitted what I have tried to prove. The woman with the spirit of
a man, the spirit that cries to a woman. 'Advance,' 'Accomplish,' 'Be
something,' 'Strike for yourself,' cannot sit idly by while all the
world moves on. If it is true that I have chosen the wrong means,
the wrong way, to better my lot I did it through ignorance, and that
ignorance is the fault of the times in which I live, of the system
that guides the era in which I live.

"I am what the world calls 'educated,' but the world, the world of
men, knows better. It laughs at me. It has cheated me because I am
a woman. The world of men has fenced me in and hobbled me with
convention, with precedent, with fictitious sentiment. If I pursue
the business of men as they themselves would pursue it I am called an
ungrateful daughter. If I should adopt the morals of men I would be
call