ture?"

I have always wondered why.

_Aristippus._ You forget that it was Eve who first picked fruit from the
tree of knowledge.

_Diogenes._ The only use she made of it was to get the idea of dress;
and the primeval curse still clings to man, in the shape of milliners'
bills.

_Aristippus._ Nevertheless we ought to be grateful to her for her
enterprising spirit. Whatever her motives may have been, you must admit
that her move was in the right direction. Where would we be now, had the
future of the race been left to Adam alone? And if woman did turn man
out of Paradise, she has done her best ever since to make it up to him.
Every pretty girl one sees is a reminiscence of the garden of Eden.

_Diogenes._

"This mischief had not then befallen,
And more that shall befell, innumerable
Disturbances on earth through female snares."

It was an excellent fancy of the ancients to make woman the incarnation
of original sin,--the tempter and the temptation in one,--a combination
of the apple and the serpent. King David, Herod, and even the terrible
Bluebeard, might have behaved well in a world without women. It is
proverbial that there is no quarrel without a woman in it.

_Aristippus._ Because, as Steele said, there is nothing else worth
quarrelling about.

_Hipparchia._ Admirable! You remind me of the two shepherds in a
pastoral who sing in alternate strains.

"Be mine your tuneful struggle to deride."

You, Diogenes, should recollect that woman is a fact you cannot get rid
of, and that the only remedy for your complaints is to improve her
condition. And you, Aristippus, like a thousand other sentimental
conservatives, cannot hear the suggestion that woman might do something
more in this world than she is now doing without giving tongue at once:
"Woman's sphere is the home,"--"Woman's mission is to be beautiful, to
cheer, and to elevate." Suppose she has no home, and is old and ugly;
what then? I know nothing more cheering and elevating than intelligence
and efficiency; and I have never heard that either was detrimental to
beauty. Is your ideal a woman who is good for nothing?--

"Bred only and completed to the taste
Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,
To dress and troll the tongue and roll the eye"?

_Aristippus._ Not at all. I believe in the old Roman notion, that
woman's domestic honor and chief praise is, _Domi mansit, lanam
fecit_,--with the qualification, that _lanam