njoy being a woman, and who is forced at
the same time to encounter the laws of Nature, and pay at the same
time, the penalty of being a woman, and the penalty of knowledge. For,
just so surely as we live, we must encounter love.--"

"You might take it out," interrupted the husband, "in feeling
flattered that it takes so much to conquer such as you."

"So we might, but that, once conquered, neither man nor Nature has any
further use for us, and regret, like art, is long. Not even you can
deny," she exclaimed, sitting up in some excitement, and letting her
cushions fall in a mess all about her, "that life is very unfair to
women."

"Well, I don't see that. Physically it is a little rough on you, but
there are compensations."

"I have never been able to discover them. Love itself is hard on a
woman. It seems to stir a man's faculties healthily. They seem the
stronger and more fit for it. It does not seem to uproot a man's whole
being. Does it serve women in that way?"

"I bear witness that it makes some of you deucedly handsome. And I
have heard that it makes some of you--good."

"Yes, as chastisement does. No, Life seems to have adjusted matters
between men and women very badly, very unjustly."

"And yet, as this life is the only one we know we must adjust
ourselves to it as we find it."

"No, no. We had better have accepted the thing as Nature gave it to
us. We came into this world like beasts--why aren't we content to live
like beasts, and make no pretenses? Women would have nothing to expect
then, and there'd be no such thing as broken hearts. In spite of all
the polish of civilization, man is simply bent on conquest. Woman is
only one phase of the chase to him--a chase in which every active
virile man is occupied from his cradle to his grave. You are the
conquerors. We are simply the conquered."

Shattuck tried to make his voice light, as he said: "Not always
unhappy ones, I fancy."

"I suppose all men flatter themselves that way, and argue that
probably the Sabine women preferred their fate to no fate at all."

"Don't be bitter on so old and impersonal a topic, Naomi. It is the
law of life that one must give, and one must take. That the emotions
differ does not prove that one is better than the other."

Shattuck took a turn up and down the long room, not quite at ease with
himself.

Mrs. Shattuck seemed to be thinking. As he passed her, he stopped,
picked up her cushions, and re-arranged them about