you
had happened to hear something, you would pore over us and our condition
night and day; but because we are before your eyes you never look at us.
You care nothing that this is ragged and ugly," she said, putting
her little finger on his sleeve; "but you strive mightily to make an
imaginary leaf on an old stick beautiful. I'm sorry you don't care for
the position of women; I should have liked us to be friends; and it is
the only thing about which I think much or feel much--if, indeed, I
have any feeling about anything," she added, flippantly, readjusting her
dainty little arms. "When I was a baby, I fancy my parents left me out
in the frost one night, and I got nipped internally--it feels so!"

"I have only a few old thoughts," he said, "and I think them over and
over again; always beginning where I left off. I never get any further.
I am weary of them."

"Like an old hen that sits on its eggs month after month and they never
come out?" she said quickly. "I am so pressed in upon by new things
that, lest they should trip one another up, I have to keep forcing
them back. My head swings sometimes. But this one thought stands, never
goes--if I might but be one of these born in the future; then, perhaps,
to be born a woman will not be to be born branded."

Waldo looked at her. It was hard to say whether she were in earnest or
mocking.

"I know it is foolish. Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't
bring down," she said. "But we are cursed. Waldo, born cursed from the
time our mothers bring us into the world till the shrouds are put on us.
Do not look at me as though I were talking nonsense. Everything has two
sides--the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn."

"I am not laughing," said the boy, sedately enough; "but what curses
you?"

He thought she would not reply to him, she waited so long.

"It is not what is done to us, but what is made of us," she said at
last, "that wrongs us. No man can be really injured but by what modifies
himself. We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much
natural force, perhaps, but for the rest--blank; and the world tells us
what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To
you it says--"Work;" and to us it says--"Seem!" To you it says--As you
approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and
your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall
gain all that human heart desires. To us it s