ce against a possible attack from Ann Veronica.
"It may not be just and so forth, but, after all, it is how things are.
Women are not in the world in the same sense that men are--fighting
individuals in a scramble. I don't see how they can be. Every home is a
little recess, a niche, out of the world of business and competition, in
which women and the future shelter."

"A little pit!" said Ann Veronica; "a little prison!"

"It's just as often a little refuge. Anyhow, that is how things are."

"And the man stands as the master at the mouth of the den."

"As sentinel. You forget all the mass of training and tradition and
instinct that go to make him a tolerable master. Nature is a mother; her
sympathies have always been feminist, and she has tempered the man to
the shorn woman."

"I wish," said Ann Veronica, with sudden anger, "that you could know
what it is to live in a pit!"

She stood up as she spoke, and put down her cup beside Miss Garvice's.
She addressed Capes as though she spoke to him alone.

"I can't endure it," she said.

Every one turned to her in astonishment.

She felt she had to go on. "No man can realize," she said, "what that
pit can be. The way--the way we are led on! We are taught to believe we
are free in the world, to think we are queens.... Then we find out.
We find out no man will treat a woman fairly as man to man--no man. He
wants you--or he doesn't; and then he helps some other woman against
you.... What you say is probably all true and necessary.... But
think of the disillusionment! Except for our sex we have minds like men,
desires like men. We come out into the world, some of us--"

She paused. Her words, as she said them, seemed to her to mean nothing,
and there was so much that struggled for expression. "Women are mocked,"
she said. "Whenever they try to take hold of life a man intervenes."

She felt, with a sudden horror, that she might weep. She wished she had
not stood up. She wondered wildly why she had stood up. No one spoke,
and she was impelled to flounder on. "Think of the mockery!" she said.
"Think how dumb we find ourselves and stifled! I know we seem to have
a sort of freedom.... Have you ever tried to run and jump in
petticoats, Mr. Capes? Well, think what it must be to live in them--soul
and mind and body! It's fun for a man to jest at our position."

"I wasn't jesting," said Capes, abruptly.

She stood face to face with him, and his voice cut across her speech
and