‘One can imagine a man’s becoming a senior wrangler.’ She made the remark to Dinah as they watched the everlasting bobbins whirl. ‘Yes, even I, with my halting Euclid and weak algebra (of which, no doubt, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot has spoken), can imagine a man’s becoming a senior wrangler. I can no more conceive of bobbin-turning than I could of a world in which two and two shall make five.’ Dinah’s slower brain needed time for reflection. ‘There could not be a world where two and two make five,’ she observed with certainty. ‘And lace-making, once you have served your time, steadily, is easy enough. Two of my cousins, down Honiton way, are lace-makers, and I learned a little of it when I was a child. The number of threads looks hard to strangers, Miss Bartrand, but it just gets to one twirl of the bobbins in time. Many of the workers keep to the same pattern for life, when they know it well. After a bit, your fingers work without your eyes.’ ‘How horrible! One twirl of the bobbins, one pattern, for life! And to think that lace-makers do not commit suicide by scores!’ ‘I don’t know that there’s much difference between lacework, or wool-work, or plain sewing,’ said Dinah Arbuthnot. ‘We have, all of us, to go through with our day’s task, whatever the stitch may be.’ The speech came so naturally, was so fraught with unconscious womanly humility, that Marjorie felt abashed. What real heroism, of an incomprehensible kind, must not Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife possess? This girl of two-and-twenty who worked perpetual cross-stitch, who kept her tongue and spirit calm, who loved, with soul and might, yonder _débonnaire_ gentleman, of the handsome eyes and decorative smile, sketching charming Parisian fisher-girls on the beach--under Linda Thorne’s criticism! ‘If I speak hotly against needlework, it is that I am thinking of Spain, my mother’s country. In Spain, you must know, the miserable girls, to this hour, scarcely learn more than embroidery in their schools and convents, with reading enough, perhaps, to stumble through the announcement of a bull-fight, or decipher a love-letter. Of course,’ admitted Marjorie Bartrand coldly, ‘it is said that when a woman marries, in England or in Spain, she must do as her husband wills. I never see the force of that “must.” I think a woman should do what is right for herself, with large trust in Providence as to the rest! The question is not one that concerns me. Still, Mrs. Arbuthnot, one cannot help feeling indignant about all very crushed people. I am dead against slavery, especially when slavery puts on a domestic garb.’