then you would have been ambitious, and aspired to the
very rank that now palls upon you." Mandeville continued--

"You women are at once debarred from public life and yet influence it.
You are the prisoners, and yet the despots of society. Have you talents?
it is criminal to indulge them in public; and thus, as talent cannot be
stifled, it is misdirected in private; you seek ascendency over your
own limited circle; and what should have been genius degenerates into
cunning. Brought up from your cradles to dissembling your most beautiful
emotions--your finest principles are always tinctured with artifice. As
your talents, being stripped of their wings are driven to creep
along the earth, and imbibe its mire and clay; so are your affections
perpetually checked and tortured into conventional paths, and a
spontaneous feeling is punished as a deliberate crime. You are untaught
the broad and sound principles of life; all that you know of morals are
its decencies and forms. Thus you are incapable of estimating the public
virtues and the public deficiencies of a brother or a son; and one
reason why _we_ have no Brutus, is because _you_ have no Portia.
Turkey has its seraglio for the person; but custom in Europe has also a
seraglio for the mind."

Constance smiled at the philosopher's passion; but she was a woman, and
she was moved by it.

"Perhaps," said she, "in the progress of events, the state of the women
may be improved as well as that of the men."

"Doubtless, at some future stage of the world. And believe me, Lady
Erpingham, politician and schemer as you are, that no legislative
reform alone will improve mankind: it is the social state which requires
reformation."

"But you asked me some minutes since," said Constance, after a pause,
"if the object of my pursuit was religion. I disappointed but not
surprised you by my answer."

"Yes: you grieved me, because, in your case, religion could alone fill
the dreary vacuum of your time. For, with your enlarged and cultivated
mind, you would not view the grandest of earthly questions in a narrow
and sectarian light. You would not think religion consisted in a
sanctified demeanour, in an ostentatious almsgiving, in a harsh judgment
of all without the pale of your opinions. You would behold in it a
benign and harmonious system of morality, which takes from ceremony
enough not to render it tedious but impressive. The school of the Bayles
and Voltaires is annihilated. Men begi