o
understand that young women in those countries are permitted an amount
of freedom that is shocking to the French mind, but the idea has not
permeated to the lower strata of society.

"If you are really desirous of investigating the ways of the female
population of the poorer quarters, I shall be happy to escort you
whenever you like, but I do not think you will be altogether gratified
with the result of your researches, and I think that you would obtain a
much closer insight into French lower class life by studying Balzac and
some of the modern writers--they are not always savory, but at least
they are realistic."

"Balzac is terrible," she said, "and some of the others I have read a
little of are detestable. I don't think you can be serious in advising
me to read them."

"I certainly should not advise you to read any of them, Miss Brander, if
you were a young lady of the ordinary type; but as you take up the cause
of woman in general it is distinctly necessary that you should study all
the phases of female life. How else can you grapple with the question?"

"You are laughing at me again, Mr. Hartington," she said, somewhat
indignantly.

"I can assure you that I am not. If your crusade is in favor only of
girls of the upper and middle classes, you are touching but the fringe
of the subject, for they are outnumbered by twenty to one by those of
other classes, and those in far greater need of higher life than the
others."

"It seems rather hopeless," Mary Brander said, despondently, after a
pause, "one is so unable to influence them."

"Exactly so. You are setting yourself to move a mountain. When the time
comes there may be an upheaval, and the mountain may move of its own
accord; but the efforts of a thousand or ten thousand women as earnest
as yourself would be no more use in proportion, than those of a colony
of ants working to level the mountain."

"Don't discourage me, Cuthbert," she said, pitifully. "I do believe with
all my heart in my principles, but I do often feel discouraged. The task
seems to grow larger and more difficult the more I see of it, and I own
that living a year among German women was rather crushing to me."

"That I can quite understand," he said, with a smile, "the average
German woman differs as widely in her ideas--I do not say aspirations,
for she has none--from your little group of theorists at Girton as the
poles are apart."

"But do not think," she replied, rallying, "that I