A Little Journey in the World | Page 7

I never thought of her as a brilliant woman.
"What mischief have you been attempting, Mr. Morgan?" asked
Margaret, as she took a chair near him. "Were you trying to make Mr.
Lyon comfortable by dragging in Bunker Hill?"
"No; that was Mr. Fairchild, in his capacity as host."
"Oh, I'm sure you needn't mind me," said Mr. Lyon, good-humoredly.
"I landed in Boston, and the first thing I went to see was the Monument.
It struck me as so odd, you know, that the Americans should begin life
by celebrating their first defeat."
"That is our way," replied Margaret, quickly. "We have started on a
new basis over here; we win by losing. He who loses his life shall find
it. If the red slayer thinks he slays he is mistaken. You know the
Southerners say that they surrendered at last simply because they got
tired of beating the North."

"How odd!"
"Miss Debree simply means," I exclaimed, "that we have inherited
from the English an inability to know when we are whipped."
"But we were not fighting the battle of Bunker Hill, or fighting about it,
which is more serious, Miss Debree. What I wanted to ask you was
whether you think the domestication of religion will affect its power in
the regulation of conduct."
"Domestication? You are too deep for me, Mr. Morgan. I don't any
more understand you than I comprehend the writers who write about
the feminization of literature."
"Well, taking the mystery out of it, the predominant element of worship,
making the churches sort of good-will charitable associations for the
spread of sociability and good-feeling."
"You mean making Christianity practical?"
"Partially that. It is a part of the general problem of what women are
going to make of the world, now they have got hold of it, or are getting
hold of it, and are discontented with being women, or with being
treated as women, and are bringing their emotions into all the
avocations of life."
"They cannot make it any worse than it has been."
"I'm not sure of that. Robustness is needed in churches as much as in
government. I don't know how much the cause of religion is advanced
by these church clubs of Christian Endeavor if that is the name,
associations of young boys and girls who go about visiting other like
clubs in a sufficiently hilarious manner. I suppose it's the spirit of the
age. I'm just wondering whether the world is getting to think more of
having a good time than it is of salvation."
"And you think woman's influence--for you cannot mean anything
else--is somehow taking the vigor out of affairs, making even the

church a soft, purring affair, reducing us all to what I suppose you
would call a mush of domesticity."
"Or femininity."
"Well, the world has been brutal enough; it had better try a little
femininity now."
"I hope it will not be more cruel to women."
"That is not an argument; that is a stab. I fancy you are altogether
skeptical about woman. Do you believe in her education?"
"Up to a certain point, or rather, I should say, after a certain point."
"That's it," spoke up my wife, shading her eyes from the fire with a fan.
"I begin to have my doubts about education as a panacea. I've noticed
that girls with only a smattering--and most of them in the nature of
things can go, no further--are more liable to temptations."
"That is because 'education' is mistaken for the giving of information
without training, as we are finding out in England," said Mr. Lyon.
"Or that it is dangerous to awaken the imagination without a heavy
ballast of principle," said Mr. Morgan.
"That is a beautiful sentiment," Margaret exclaimed, throwing back her
head, with a flash from her eyes. "That ought to shut out women
entirely. Only I cannot see how teaching women what men know is
going to give them any less principle than men have. It has seemed to
me a long while that the time has come for treating women like human
beings, and giving them the responsibility of their position."
"And what do you want, Margaret?" I asked.
"I don't know exactly what I do want," she answered, sinking back in
her chair, sincerity coming to modify her enthusiasm. "I don't want to
go to Congress, or be a sheriff, or a lawyer, or a locomotive engineer. I
want the freedom of my own being, to be interested in everything in the

world, to feel its life as men do. You don't know what it is to have an
inferior person condescend to you simply because he is a man."
"Yet you wish to be treated as a woman?" queried Mr. Morgan.
"Of course. Do you think I want to