t break its
wings against the bars, but would fly if the doors were open?" She knit
her forehead and leaned further over the bars.

"Then they say, 'If the women have the liberty you ask for, they will be
found in positions for which they are not fitted!' If two men climb
one ladder, did you ever see the weakest anywhere but at the foot? The
surest sign of fitness is success. The weakest never wins but where
there is handicapping. Nature, left to herself, will as beautifully
apportion a man's work to his capacities as long ages ago she graduated
the colours on the bird's breast. If we are not fit, you give us, to no
purpose, the right to labour; the work will fall out of our hands into
those that are wiser."

She talked more rapidly as she went on, as one talks of that over which
they have brooded long, and which lies near their hearts.

Waldo watched her intently.

"They say women have one great and noble work left them, and they do it
ill. That is true; they do it execrably. It is the work that demands the
broadest culture, and they have not even the narrowest. The lawyer may
see no deeper than his law-books, and the chemist see no further than
the windows of his laboratory, and they may do their work well. But the
woman who does woman's work needs a many-sided, multiform culture; the
heights and depths of human life must not be beyond the reach of her
vision; she must have knowledge of men and things in many states, a wide
catholicity of sympathy, the strength that springs from knowledge, and
the magnanimity which springs from strength. We bear the world, and
we make it. The souls of little children are marvellously delicate and
tender things, and keep forever the shadow that first falls on them, and
that is the mother's or at best a woman's. There was never a great man
who had not a great mother--it is hardly an exaggeration. The first six
years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer; and yet
some say, if a woman can cook a dinner or dress herself well she has
culture enough.

"The mightiest and noblest of human work is given to us, and we do it
ill. Send a navvie to work into an artist's studio, and see what you
will find there! And yet, thank God, we have this work," she added,
quickly--"it is the one window through which we see into the great
world of earnest labour. The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes
something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her
questions