"Our great social world, including government, congressional and diplomatic circles, club life, and all that 'progress' stands for. Instead of moving abreast with the 'advance' current, you have drifted aside into an eddy as contracted, as pitiably narrow as--pardon me, we emancipated new women dare now to speak the brazen truth--as narrow as the hands and feet you Southerners boast as sign of aristocratic blood." Eglah lifted her grey-gloved hand, examined its outlines critically, and placed it within a few inches of the broad, thick palm which Ethelberta Higginbottom had laid on her own lap as she sat in the gallery of the Senate chamber. "Thank you very much, Miss Higginbottom. It is traditional in my family to admire slender fingers, but we are not so intolerant as to deny others the privilege of occupying as much space as their digits can cover, and we never brand people as absolutely disreputable because they wear number six shoes and number seven-and-a-half gloves. If degrees of latitude determine the height of insteps, what manifest injustice has been meted out to longitudinal lines that you Westerners so proudly claim? Probably you have forgotten that my father is from New England, and he owns a silver caddy--two hundred years old--that was empty at one time because 'fish drank tea in Boston harbor.'" "Oh, but your mother was Southern and you represent not heredity, but sheredity, a sociological factor of immense potency, which must be reckoned with, let me tell you, in the near future, when women fully emancipated come to enjoyment of all the rights so long withheld from them. Then mothers, and not fathers will wield the destiny of this great country; and already female colleges are fast spreading the blessed gospel of free and equal rights. Last week some one asserted that you were a graduate of ---- College, but I contradicted it flatly, as impossible and absurd." "I am sorry I do my dear _Alma Mater_ such lamentable discredit; but, unfortunately, we were not taught to wear our diplomas on our hats as advertisements of scholarship." "You certainly amaze me!" "Perhaps you will excuse my frankness in assuring you that sensation at least is mutual." "With your educational advantages, to lock up your mind in a stockade of provincialism! Desectionalize yourself!" "May I ask whether you spell your last verb with an x or a ct? I should prefer first to ascertain which process is demanded of me." "Your Southern bigotry is a mill-stone around your neck. The very word 'emancipation' is a red rag to old slaveholders and their progeny. You never can forgive us for breaking the shackles of groaning millions held in bondage." Eglah laughed.