s figure ascending, and stood aside to let him pass. He bowed
with an unconscious assurance unlike that of any man Lydia had ever
seen, and looked at her pale face and burning eyes with some curiosity.
A faint aroma of delicate food and fading flowers and woman's
sachet-powder hung about him. It was the lecturer, fresh from his throng
of admirers. Lydia's heart leaped to a sudden valiant impulse,
astonishing to her usual shyness, and she spoke out boldly, hastily:
"Why did you tell us all that about our men? Didn't you think any of us
would realize that they are good--our men are--good and pure and kind!
Didn't you think we'd know that anything that's the matter with them
must be the matter with us, too? They had mothers as well as fathers!
It's not fair to blame everything on the men! It's not fair, and it
can't be true! We're all in together, men and women. One can't be
anything the other isn't!"

She spoke with a swift, grave directness, looking squarely into the
man's eyes, for she was as tall as he. They were quite alone in the
upper hall. From below came the clatter of the talking, eating women.
The Frenchman did not speak for a moment. For the first time the faint
smile on his lips died away. He paid to Lydia the tribute of a look as
grave as her own. Finally, "Madame, you should be French," he told her.

The remark was so unexpected an answer to her attack that Lydia's eyes
wavered. "I mean," he went on in explanation, "that you are acting as my
wife would act if she heard the men of her nation abused in their
absence. I mean also that I have delivered practically this same lecture
over thirty times in America before audiences of women, and you are the
first to--Madame, I should like to know your husband!" he exclaimed with
another bow.

"My husband is like all other American men," cried Lydia sharply,
touched to the quick by this reference. "It is because he is that I--"
She broke off with her gesture of passionate unresignation to her lack
of fluency. Already the heat of the impulse that had carried her into
speech was dying away. She began to hesitate for words.

"Oh, I can't say what I mean--you must know it, anyhow! You blame the
fathers for leaving all the bringing-up of the children to their wives,
and yet you point out that the sons keep growing up all the time to
be--to be--to be all you blame their fathers for being! If we women were
half so--fine--as you tell us, why haven't we changed things?"