She seemed to reflect. “I don’t know that it is very differently occupied. Of course, they have their own amusements; they have their dances, and little clubs, and their sewing-societies. I suppose that even an Altrurian would applaud their sewing for the poor?” Mrs. Makely asked, rather satirically. “Yes,” he answered; and then he asked: “Isn’t it taking work away from some needy seamstress, though? But I suppose you excuse it to the thoughtlessness of youth.” Mrs. Makely did not say, and he went on: “What I find it so hard to understand is how you ladies can endure a life of mere nervous exertion, such as you have been describing to me. I don’t see how you keep well.” “We _don’t_ keep well,” said Mrs. Makely, with the greatest amusement. “I don’t suppose that when you get above the working classes, till you reach the very rich, you would find a perfectly well woman in America.” “Isn’t that rather extreme?” I ventured to ask. “No,” said Mrs. Makely, “it’s shamefully moderate,” and she seemed to delight in having made out such a bad case for her sex. You can’t stop a woman of that kind when she gets started; I had better left it alone. “But,” said the Altrurian, “if you are forbidden by motives of humanity from doing any sort of manual labor, which you must leave to those who live by it, I suppose you take some sort of exercise?” “Well,” said Mrs. Makely, shaking her head gayly, “we prefer to take medicine.” “You must approve of that,” I said to the Altrurian, “as you consider exercise for its own sake insane or immoral. But, Mrs. Makely,” I entreated, “you’re giving me away at a tremendous rate. I have just been telling Mr. Homos that you ladies go in for athletics so much now in your summer outings that there is danger of your becoming physically as well as intellectually superior to us poor fellows. Don’t take that consolation from me.” “I won’t, altogether,” she said. “I couldn’t have the heart to, after the pretty way you’ve put it. I don’t call it very athletic, sitting around on hotel piazzas all summer long, as nineteen-twentieths of us do. But I don’t deny that there is a Remnant, as Matthew Arnold calls them, who do go in for tennis and boating and bathing and tramping and climbing.” She paused, and then she concluded, gleefully: “And you ought to see what wrecks they get home in the fall!” The joke was on me; I could not help laughing, though I felt rather sheepish before the Altrurian. Fortunately, he did not pursue the inquiry; his curiosity had been given a slant aside from it. “But your ladies,” he asked, “they have the summer for rest, however they use it. Do they generally leave town? I understood Mr. Twelvemough to say so,” he added, with a deferential glance at me.