Raymond had been invited by one of his fellow-guests to make a visit at his house, and this was backed up on the morning after his return by a letter containing a full invitation to both himself and his wife. He never liked what he called “doing nothing in other people’s houses,” but he thought any sacrifice needful that might break up Cecil’s present intimacies, and change the current of her ideas; and his mother fully agreed in thinking that it would be well to being a round of visits, to last until the Session of Parliament should have begin. By the time it was over Julius and Rosamond would be in their own house, and it might be easier to make a new beginning.

The friends whom he could reckon on as sure to welcome him and his bride were political acquaintances of mark, far above the Dunstone range, and Cecil could not but be gratified, even while Mrs. Duncombe and her friend declared that they were going to try to demoralize her by the seductions of the aristocracy.

After all, Cecil was too much of an ingrained Charnock to be very deeply imbued with Women’s Rights. All that she wanted was her own way, and opposition. Lady Tyrrell had fascinated her and secured her affection, and she followed her lead, which was rather that of calm curiosity and desire to hear the subject ventilated than actual partisanship, for which her ladyship was far too clever, as well as too secure in her natural supremacy. They had only seemed on that side because other people were so utterly alien to it, and because of their friendship with the really zealous Mrs. Duncombe.

The sanitary cause which had become mixed with it was, however, brought strongly before their minds by Mrs. Tallboys’ final lecture, at which she impressed on the ladies’ minds with great vehemence that here they might lead the way. If men would not act as a body, the ladies should set the example, and shame them, by each doing her very utmost in the cleansing of the nests of disease that reeked in the worn-out civilization of the cities of the old country. The ladies listened: Lady Tyrrell, with a certain interest in such an eager flow of eloquence; Eleonora, with thoughts far away. Bessie Duncombe expressed a bold practical determination to get one fragment, at least, of the work done, since she knew Pettitt, the hair-dresser, was public-spirited enough to allow her to carry out her ideas on his property, and Cecil, with her ample allowance, as yet uncalled for, in the abundance of her trousseau, promised to supply what the hair-dresser could not advance, as a tangible proof of her sincerity.

She held a little council with Mrs. Duncombe at the working society, when she resigned her day into that lady’s hands on going away. “I shall ask Mrs. Miles Charnock,” said that lady. “You don’t object?”

“Oh no, only don’t ask her till I’m gone, and you know she will only come on condition of being allowed to expound.”

“We must have somebody, and now the thing has gone on so long, and will end in three months, the goody element will not do much harm, and, unluckily, most women will not act without it.”

“You have been trying to train Miss Moy.”

“I shall try still, but I can’t get her to take interest in anything but the boisterous side of emancipation.”

“I can’t bear the girl,” said Cecil; “I am sure she comes only for the sake of the horses.”

“I’m afraid so; but she amuses Bob, and there’s always a hope of moving her father through her, though she declares that the Three Pigeons is his tenderest point, and that he had as soon meddle with it as with the apple of his eye. I suppose he gets a great rent from that Gadley.”

“Do you really think you shall do anything with her?” said Cecil, who might uphold her at home, but whose taste was outraged by her.

“I hope so! At any rate, she is not conventional. Why, when I was set free from my school at Paris, and married Bob three months later, I hadn’t three ideas in my head beyond horses and balls and soldiers. It has all come with life and reading, my dear.”

And a very odd ‘all’ it was, so far; but there was this difference between Bessie Duncombe and Cecil Charnock Poynsett, that the ‘gospel of progress’ was to the one the first she had ever really known, and became a reaching forward to a newly-perceived standard of benevolence and nobleness: to the other it was simply retrograding, and that less from conviction than from the spirit of rivalry and opposition.

Lady Tyrrell with her father and sister were likewise going to leave home, to stay among friends with whom Sir Harry could hunt until the London campaign, when Eleonora was to see the world. Thus the bazaar was postponed until the return of the ladies in the summer, when the preparations would be more complete and the season more suitable. The church must wait for it, for nothing like a sufficient amount of subscription had been as yet promised.

There was still, however, to come that select dinner-party at Mrs. Duncombe’s, to which Julius, moved by her zeal and honesty, as well as by curiosity, had promised his presence with Rosamond, “at his peril,” as she said.

They were kept so long at the door of Aucuba Villa that they had begun to doubt if they had not mistaken the day, until the Sirenwood carriage crashed up behind them; and after the third pull at the bell they were admitted by an erect, alert figure,—a remnant of Captain Duncombe’s military life.

He marshalled them into the drawing-room, where by dim firelight they could just discern the Professor and a certain good-natured horsey friend of the Captain’s, who sprang up from easy-chairs on the opposite sides of the fire to greet them, while the man hastily stirred up the fire, lighted the gas, dashed at the table, shutting up an open blotting-book that lay on it, closing an ink-bottle, and gathering up some torn fragments or paper, which he would have thrown into the scrap-basket but that it was full of little books on the hundred ways of dressing a pumpkin. Then he gave a wistful look at the ami de la maison, as if commending the guests to him, and receiving a nod in return, retired.

“I fear we are too early,” said Lady Tyrrell.

“Fact is,” said the familiar, whose name Julius was trying to remember, “there’s been a catastrophe; cook forgot to order the turkey, went to bed last night in hysterics, and blew out the gas instead of turning it off. No, no”—as the guests expecting fatal consequences, looked as if they thought they had better remove themselves: “she came round, and Duncombe has driven over to Backsworth to bring home the dinner. He’ll soon be back.”

This not appearing greatly to reassure the visitors, the Professor added, “No, no, ladies. Mrs. Duncombe charged me to say that she will be perfectly fixed in a short time, and I flatter myself that my wife is equal to any emergency.”

“It is very kind in her,” said Lady Tyrrell.

“I confess,” said Professor Tallboys, “that I am not sorry that such an occasion should occur of showing an American lady’s domestic powers. I flatter myself they do not discredit her cause.”

Just then were heard the wheels of the drag, and in rushed one of the boys, grasping Eleonora’s skirts, and proclaiming, “We’ve got the grub! Oysters and a pie! Oh my!”

“Satisfactory!” said the friend. “But let go, Ducky, you are rumpling Miss Vivian.”

“She’s coming to see the quarion! You promised, Lena! Here’s a jolly crayfish! He’ll pinch!”

There was a small conservatory or glazed niche on one side of the room, into which the boy dragged Lenore, and Julius followed, dimly sensible of what the quarion might be, and hoping for a word with the young lady, while he trusted to his wife to occupy her sister.

The place contained two desolate camellias, with leaves in the same proportion as those on trees in the earlier ages of illumination, and one scraggy, leafless geranium, besides a green and stagnant tank, where a goldfish moved about, flapping and gasping, as the boy disturbed it in his search for the crayfish. He absorbed all the conversation, so that Julius could only look back into the room, where an attempt at artistic effect was still dimly visible through accumulated litter. The Venus of Milo stood on a bracket, with a riding-whip in her arms, and a bundle of working society tickets behind her, and her vis-à-vis, the Faun of Praxiteles, was capped by a glove with one finger pointing upwards, and had a ball of worsted tangled about his legs; but further observation was hindered by the man-servant’s voice at the outer door, “Master Ducky, where are you? Your ma says you are to go to bed directly.”

“No, no, I’ll put myself to bed!”

“Come, sir, please do, like a good boy—Master Pinney won’t go without you, and I must put him to bed while they are dishing up. Come, sir, I’ve got a mince-pie for you.”

“And some oysters—Bobby said I should have some oysters!”

“Yes, yes; come along, sir.”

And Master Ducky submitted to his fate, while Julius looked his wonder, and asked, “Is he nursery-maid?”

“Just now, since the bonne went,” said Lenore. “He is a most faithful, attached servant, who will do anything for them. She does attach people deeply when the first shock is over.”

“I am coming to believe so,” he answered. “There seem to me to be excellent elements.”

“I am so glad!” said Lenore; “she is so thorough, so true and frank; and much of this oddness is really an inconsistent struggle to keep out of debt.”

“Well! at any rate I am thankful to her for this opportunity of seeing you,” said Julius. “We have both been longing to speak our welcome to you.”

“Thank you. It is so kind,” she fervently whispered; “all the kinder for the state of things that is insisted on—though you know that it can make no real difference,” she added, apparently addressing the goldfish.

“Frank knows it,” said Julius, in a low voice.

“I trust he does, though I cannot see him to assure him—you will?” she added, looking up at him with a shy brightness in her eye and a flush on her cheek.

“Yes, indeed!” he said, laying his hand on hers for a moment. “I fear you may both have much to pull through, but I think you are of a steadfast nature.”

“I hope so—I think I am, for none of my feelings seem to me ever to change, except that I get harder, and, I am afraid, bitterer.”

“I can understand your feeling that form of trial.”

“Oh, if you could, and would help me!”

“As a brother; if I may.”

Again she laid a hand on his, saying, “I have longed to talk openly to you ever since we met in the cow-shed; but I could not make any advance to any of you, because,” she whispered in haste, “I thought it my duty to hold back from Frank. And now, till we go away, Camilla watches me and occupies me every minute, will not even let me ride out with papa. I wonder she lets me talk to you now.”

“We know each other,” said Julius, shortly.

It was so. Once, in the plain-spoken days of childhood, Miles and Julius had detected Camilla Vivian in some flagrant cheating at a game, and had roundly expressed their opinion. In the subsequent period of Raymond’s courtship, Miles had succumbed to the fascination, but Julius had given one such foil, that she had never again attempted to cajole him.

“I have seen that you did from the first,” said Lenore. “And it would make it much easier to talk to you than to any outsider, who would never understand, even if it were possible for me to explain, how hard it is to see which way my duty lies—especially filial.”

“Do you mean in general, or in this special matter?”

“Both. You see, in her hands he is so different from what he was before she came home, that I don’t feel as if I was obeying him—only her; and I don’t think I am bound to do that. Not in the great matter, I am clear. Nobody can meddle with my real sincere pledge of myself to Frank, nobody!” she spoke as if there was iron in her lips. “But as far as overt acts go, they have a right to forbid me, till I am of age at least, and we must bear it.”

“Yes, you are right there.”

“But there are thousands of other little cases of right and wrong, and altogether I have come to such a spirit of opposition that I find it easier to resist than to do anything with a good grace.”

“You cannot always tell when resistance is principle, and when temper or distaste.”

“There’s distaste enough always,” said poor Lenore.

“To gaieties?” he said, amazed as one habituated to his wife’s ravenous appetite for any sort of society or amusement.

“Of course,” she answered sadly. “A great deal of trouble just for a little empty babble. Often not one word worth remembering, and a general sense of having been full of bad feelings.”

“No enjoyment?” he asked in surprise.

“Only by the merest chance and exception,” she answered, surprised at his surprise; “what is there to enjoy?”

The peculiar-looking clergyman might have seemed more likely to ask such a question than the beautiful girl, but he looked at her anxiously and said, “Don’t nourish morbid dislike and contempt, my dear Lena, it is not a safeguard. There are such things as perilous reactions. Try to weigh justly, and be grateful for kindness, and to like what is likeable.”

At that moment, after what had been an interval of weary famine to all but these two, host and hostess appeared, the lady as usual, picturesque, though in the old black silk, with a Roman sash tied transversely, and holly in her hair; and gaily shaking hands—“That’s right, Lady Rosamond; so you are trusted here! Your husband hasn’t sent you to represent him?”

“I’m afraid his confidence in me did not go so far,” said Rosamond.

“Ah! I see—Lady Tyrrell, how d’ye do—you’ve brought Lena? Well, Rector, are you prepared?”

“That depends on what you expect of me.”

“Have you the convinceable spot in your mind?”

“We must find it. It is very uncommon, and indurates very soon, so we had better make the most of our opportunity,” said the American lady, who had entered as resplendent as before, though in so different a style that Rosamond wondered how such a wardrobe could be carried about the world; and the sporting friend muttered, “Stunning! she has been making kickshaws all day, and looks as if she came out of a bandbox! If all women were like that, it might pay.”

It was true. Mrs. Tallboys was one of those women of resource whose practical powers may well inspire the sense of superiority, and with the ease and confidence of her country.

The meal was a real success. That some portion had been procured, ready dressed, at Backsworth, was evident, but all that had been done at home had a certain piquant Transatlantic flavour, in which the American Muse could be detected; and both she and her husband were polished, lively, and very agreeable, in spite of the twang in their voices. Miss Moy, the Captain and his friend, talked horses at one end of the table, and Rosamond faltered her woman’s horror for the rights of her sex, increased by this supposed instance.

When the ladies rose at dessert, Mrs. Duncombe summoned him: “Come, Rector!—come, Professor! you’re not to sit over your wine.”

“We rise so far above the ordinary level of manhood!” said Julius, obediently rising.

“Once for all, Mr. Charnock,” said Mrs. Duncombe, turning on him with flashing eyes and her Elizabethan majesty, “if you come prepared to scoff, we can have nothing to do with you.”

Rosamond’s eyes looked mischievous, and her brow cocked, but Julius answered in earnest, “Really, I assure you I have not come in a spirit of sarcasm; I am honestly desirous of hearing your arguments.”

“Shall I stay in your stead?” added Miss Moy. “They’ll be much more amusing here!”

“Come, Gussie, you’re on your good behaviour,” said Mrs. Duncombe. “Bob kept you to learn the right way of making a sensation.”

As they entered the drawing-room two more guests arrived, namely, Joanna Bowater, and Herbert, who walked in with a kind of grim submission, till he saw Lady Tyrrell, when he lighted up, and, on a little gracious gesture with her hand, he sat down on the sofa beside her; and was there solaced by an occasional remark in an undertone; for indeed the boy was always in a trance wherever she was, and she had a fair amount of by-play wherewith to entertain herself and him during the discussion.

“You are just in time, Jenny,” said Rosamond; “the great question is going to be started.”

“And it is—?”

“The Equality of the Sexes,” pronounced Mrs. Duncombe.

“Ex cathedrâ?” said Julius, as the graceful Muse seated herself in a large red arm-chair. “This scene is not an easy one in which to dispute it.”

“You see, Bessie,” said Mrs. Tallboys, “that men are so much afraid of the discussion that they try to elude it with empty compliment under which is couched a covert sneer.”

“Perhaps,” returned Julius, “we might complain that we can’t open our lips without compliments and sneers being detected when we were innocent of both.”

“Were you?” demanded Mrs. Tallboys.

“Honestly, I was looking round and thinking the specimens before us would tell in your favour.”

“What a gallant parson!” cried Miss Moy.

But a perfect clamour broke out from others.

“Julius, that’s too bad! when you know—”

“Mr Charnock, you are quite mistaken. Bob is much cleverer than I, in his own line—”

“Quite true, Rector,” affirmed Herbert; “Joan has more brains than all the rest of us—for a woman, I mean.”

“For a woman!” repeated Mrs. Tallboys. “Let a human being do or be what she will, it is disposed of in a moment by that one verdict, ‘Very well for a woman!’”

“How is it with the decision of posterity?” said Jenny. “Can you show any work of woman of equal honour and permanence with that of men?”

“Because her training has been sedulously inferior.”

“Not always,” said Jenny; “not in Italy in the cinque cento, nor in England under Elizabeth.”

“Yes, and there were names—!”

“Names, yes, but that is all. The lady’s name is remembered for the curiosity of her having equalled the ordinary poet or artist of her time, but her performances either are lost or only known to curious scholars. They have not the quality which makes things permanent.”

“What do you say to Sappho?”

“There is nothing of her but a name, and fragments that curious scholars read.”

“Worse luck to her if she invented Sapphics,” added Herbert.

“One of womankind’s torments for mankind, eh?” said his neighbour.

“And there are plenty more such,” asserted Mrs. Duncombe, boldly (for these were asides). “It is only that one can’t recollect—and the men have suppressed them.”

“I think men praised them,” said Jenny, “and that we remember the praise, not the works. For instance, Roswitha, or Olympia Morata, or Vittoria Colonna. Vittoria’s sonnets are extant, but we only value them as being hers, more for what she was than for their intrinsic merit.”

“And,” added Eleonora, “men did not suppress Hannah More, or Joanna Baillie. You know Scott thought Miss Baillie’s dramas would rank with Shakespeare’s.”

Mrs. Tallboys was better read in logic and mathematics than in history, and did not follow Jenny, but she turned her adversary’s argument to her own advantage, by exclaiming, “Are the gentlemen present familiar with these bright lights?”

“I confess my ignorance of some of them,” said Julius.

“But my youngest brother knows all that,” said Rosamond at a brave venture.

“Macaulay’s school-boy,” murmured Lady Tyrrell, softly.

“Let us return to the main point,” said Mrs. Tallboys, a little annoyed. “It is of the present and future that I would speak, not of the past.”

“Does not the past give the only data on which to form a conclusion?” said Julius.

“Certainly not. The proposition is not what a woman or two in her down-trodden state may have exceptionally effected, but her natural equality, and in fact superiority, in all but the physical strength which has imposed an unjust bondage on the higher nature.”

“I hardly know where to meet you if you reject all arguments from proved facts,” said Julius.

“And the Bible. Why don’t you say the Bible?” exclaimed his wife in an undertone; but Mrs. Tallboys took it up and said, “The precepts of Scripture are founded on a state of society passed away. You may find arguments for slavery there.”

“I doubt that,” said Julius. “There are practical directions for an existing state of things, which have been distorted into sanction for its continuance. The actual precepts are broad principles, which are for all times, and apply to the hired servant as well as to the slave. So again with the relations of man and wife; I can nowhere find a command so adapted to the seclusion and depression of the Eastern woman as to be inapplicable to the Christian matron. And the typical virtuous woman, the valiant woman, is one of the noblest figures anywhere depicted.”

“I know,” said Mrs. Tallboys, who had evidently been waiting impatiently again to declaim, “that men, even ministers of religion, from Paul if you like downwards, have been willing enough to exalt woman so long as they claim to sit above her. The higher the oppressed, so much higher the self-exaltation of the oppressor. Paul and Peter exalt their virtuous woman, but only as their own appendage, adorning themselves; and while society with religious ministers at the head of it call on woman to submit, and degrade the sex, we shall continue to hear of such disgraces to England as I see in your police reports—brutal mechanics beating their wives.”

“I fear while physical force is on the side of the brute,” said Julius, “no abstract recognition of equality would save her.”

“Society would take up her cause, and protect her.”

“So it is willing to do now, if she asks for protection.”

“Yes,” broke in Rosamond, “but nothing would induce a woman worth sixpence to take the law against her husband.”

“There I think Lady Rosamond has at once demonstrated the higher nature of the woman,” said Mrs. Tallboys. “What man would be capable of such generosity?”

“No one denies,” said Julius, “that generous forbearance, patience, fortitude, and self-renunciation, belong almost naturally to the true wife and mother, and are her great glory; but would she not be stripped of them by self-assertion as the peer in power?”

“Turning our flank again with a compliment,” said Mrs. Duncombe. “These fine qualities are very convenient to yourselves, and so you praise them up.”

“Not so!” returned Julius, “because they are really the higher virtues!”

“Patience!” at once exclaimed the American and English emancipators with some scorn.

“Yes,” said Julius, in a low tone of thorough earnest. “The patience of strength and love is the culmination of virtue.”

Jenny knew what was in his mind, but Mrs. Tallboys, with a curious tone, half pique, half triumph, said, “You acknowledge this which you call the higher nature in woman—that is to say, all the passive qualities,—and you are willing to allow her a finer spiritual essence, and yet you do not agree to her equal rights. This is the injustice of the prejudice which has depressed her all these centuries.”

“Stay,” broke in Jenny, evidently not to the lady’s satisfaction. “That does not state the question. Nobody denies that woman is often of a higher and finer essence, as you say, than man, and has some noble qualities in a higher degree than any but the most perfect men; but that is not the question. It is whether she have more force and capacity than man, is in fact actually able to be on an equality.”

“And, I say,” returned Mrs. Tallboys, “that man has used brute force to cramp woman’s intellect and energy so long, that she has learnt to acquiesce in her position, and to abstain from exerting herself, so that it is only where she is partially emancipated, as in my own country, that any idea of her powers can be gained.”

“I am afraid,” said Julius, “that more may be lost to the world than is gained! No; I am not speaking from the tyrant point of view. I am thinking whether free friction with the world way not lessen that sweetness and tender innocence and purity that make a man’s home an ideal and a sanctuary—his best earthly influence.”

“This is only sentiment. Innocence is worthless if it cannot stand alone and protect itself!” said Mrs. Tallboys.

“I do not mean innocence unable to stand alone. It should be strong and trustworthy, but should have the bloom on it still, not rubbed off by contact or knowledge of evil. Desire of shielding that bloom from the slightest breath of contamination is no small motive for self-restraint, and therefore a great preservative to most men.”

“Women purify the atmosphere wherever they go,” said the lady.

“Many women do,” returned Julius; “but will they retain that power universally if they succeed in obtaining a position where there will be less consideration for them, and they must be exposed to a certain hardening and roughening process?”

“If so,” exclaimed Mrs. Tallboys, “if men are so base, we would soon assert ourselves. We are no frail morning glories for you to guard and worship with restraint, lest forsooth your natural breath should wither us away.”

As she spoke the door opened, and, with a strong reek of tobacco, in came the two other gentlemen. “Well, Rector, have you given in?” asked the Captain. “Is Lady Rosamond to mount the pulpit henceforth?”

“Ah! wouldn’t I preach you a sermon,” returned Rosamond.

“To resume,” said Mrs. Tallboys, sitting very upright. “You still go on the old assumption that woman was made for you. It is all the same story: one man says she is for his pleasure, another for his servant, and you, for—for his refinement. You would all have us adjectives. Now I defy you to prove that woman is not a substantive, created for herself.”

“If you said ‘growed,’ Mrs. Tallboys, it would be more consistent,” said Jenny. “Her creation and her purpose in the world stand upon precisely the same authority.”

“I wonder at you, Miss Bowater,” said Mrs. Tallboys. “I cannot understand a woman trying to depreciate her sex.”

“No,” thrust in Gussie Moy; “I want to know why a woman can’t go about without a dowager waddling after her” (“Thank you,” breathed Lady Tyrrell into Herbert’s ear), “nor go to a club.”

“There was such a club proposed in London,” said Captain Duncombe, “and do you know, Gussie, the name of it?”

“No!”

“The Middlesex Club!”

“There! it is just as Mrs. Tallboys said; you will do nothing but laugh at us, or else talk sentiment about our refining you. Now, I want to be free to amuse myself.”

“I don’t think those trifling considerations will be great impediments in your way,” said Lady Tyrrell in her blandest tone. “Is that actually the carriage? Thank you, Mrs. Tallboys. This is good-bye, I believe. I am sorry there has not been more time for a fuller exposition to-night.”

“There would have been, but I never was so interrupted,” said Mrs. Tallboys in an undertone, with a displeased look at Jenny at the other end of the room.

Declamation was evidently more the Muse’s forte than argument, but her aside was an aside, and that of the jockey friend was not. “So you waited for us to give your part of the lecture, Miss Moy?”

“Of course. What’s the use of talking to a set of women and parsons, who are just the same?”

Poor Herbert’s indignant flush infinitely amused the party who were cloaking in the hall. “Poor Gussie; her tongue runs fast,” said Mrs. Duncombe.

“Emancipated!” said Jenny. “Good-bye, Mrs. Duncombe. Please let us be educated up to our privileges before we get them.”

“A Parthian shot, Jenny,” said Julius, as they gave her a homeward lift in the carriage. “You proved yourself the fittest memberess for the future parliament to-night.”

“To be elected by the women and parsons,” said Jenny, with little chuckle of fun. “Poor Herbert!”

“I only wish that girl was a man that I might horsewhip her,” the clerical sentiment growled out from Herbert’s corner of the carriage. “Degradation of her sex! She’s a standing one!”