“You can do nothing! I never can accept your suit! Pray, to begin with, are you aware that I am a girl of very obscure birth?” “That is nothing to me, beloved——” “That I have not a penny——” “I have more than enough for both, Britomarte!” “And, worse than all, that the shadow of a great shame is thought to rest upon my life!” “How should that affect your personal merit, or my appreciation of it? Come, darling, come! I never can be less than your lover! let me be more! accept me for your husband!” “For my master, you mean! that is what ‘husband’ signifies in your laws!” said the man-hater, coldly turning away, as once more Woman’s Rights throttled and threw down woman’s love. “No! Heaven forbid! I could no more be a tyrant than I could be a slave! My soul abhors both! And if in your own soul there is one quality that attracts me more than all the others, it is your impassioned love of liberty. I sympathize with it, my beloved! I have no wish to rule over you as a master! I could not, indeed, endure the love of a slave! Or if one must serve, let it be the stronger. I wish only to cherish you as my beloved wife, to honor you as my liege lady! Come, darling!” But Woman’s Rights had her heel upon the neck of woman’s love, and Britomarte coldly answered, as she walked away: “I do not know, for my part, how, in this age and country, with the old barbarous laws of marriage still in force, any sane, honest man can look a woman in the face, and seriously ask her to be his wife! For their own honor, I wonder men do not set about and remodel their disgraceful laws before they do anything else! As for me, if these days were like the ‘old heroic days’ of which you just now spoke, when men braved deadly perils and wrought great works for woman’s smile, I would have every woman lay upon her suitor the holy task of reforming the laws as the only possible condition of her favor!” “I will take up the gauntlet you have thrown down,” he said. “I will look into these offensive statutes that were made, by the by, some centuries before I was born, and for which, therefore, I do not see that I can be held individually responsible——” “But you are responsible for them,” warmly interrupted Britomarte. “Every man who lives under them, marries under them, sees women robbed and oppressed under them, without rising up to oppose them, is as much responsible for them as if he, and he only, had originally enacted them!” “Granted that this is in a measure true! It shall be so with me no longer,” smiled Justin. “I will examine these, and wherever I conscientiously believe they need reform, I will labor zealously with pen and tongue to reform them. But, in the meantime, as I cannot give my whole mind to any subject—not even to that—until my heart is set at rest, Britomarte, dear Britomarte! be my wife! and we will labor together lovingly, zealously, in all good works!”