"Pardon me, but it certainly is ludicrous that one possessing your 'broad culture and desectionalized' horizon of thought should really believe in that old worn-out 'raw-head and bloody-bones' figure of speech which has done duty so long. It surely is entitled to decent interment where all dilapidated scarecrows cease from troubling. We Southern people no more want our negroes back as slaves than you desire the return of hordes of Indians whom you so completely dispossessed of their native lands in your 'wild and rapacious West,' and whom a 'white, fatherly' government is rapidly reducing to extinction by its beneficent agencies. The white South is 'emancipated' from the moral responsibility of elevating the black race now so happy in 'national' tutelage, where their guardians taught them the system of bookkeeping and all the subtle processes of the 'Freedmen's Bureau.'" "How lonely you must feel in Washington. You have no more regard for the rights of your own sex than for--" She stammered and coughed. "Indeed, I have the most affectionate and jealous regard for every right that inheres in my dower of American womanhood. I claim and enjoy the right to be as cultured, as learned, as useful, and--if you please--as ornamental in society and at home as my individual limitations will permit. I have no wrongs, no grievances, no crying need to usurp lines of work that will break down the barriers God set between men and women. I am not in rebellion against legal statutes, nor the canons of well-established decency and refinement in feminine usage, and, finally, I am so inordinately proud of being a well-born Southern woman, with a full complement of honorable great-grandfathers and blue-blooded, stainless great-grand-mothers, that I have neither pretext nor inclination to revolt against mankind." "Miss Kent, you have rather pretty eyes, but you are so steeped in Southern--what do you call it--_dolce far niente_, or _laissez faire_, or semi-stagnation of soul that you are too lazy to open them wide enough to see the thrilling vista of woman's triumph that illumines----" "Thank you; my much flattered eyes are sufficiently open at this moment to perceive the behavior of that nondescript creature in feminine garments who is flirting so undisguisedly with Senator Smallweed yonder, on your right; one of the early emancipated--an advanced lobbyist." "You mean that piquant, charming little Mrs. Morrison? Dear soul! She is a pathetically tragic object lesson. Had to get a divorce from a brutal husband and become a bread-winner. Why should not women lobby? They are so nimble witted, nature fitted them admirably for such work." "And gave them the adroitly nimble fingers to fit the pockets they pick." "That is some cowardly man's cruel slander. My creed is always to defend my own sex; it is only Christian charity and genuine feminine justice."