"Listen to me, Milton. You have been reading fiction, about this man--sometimes he's a lumberjack, and sometimes a trapper or a miner, but always he's frightfully hairy--and he sees a charming woman in the city, and kidnaps her, and shuts her up in some unspeakable shanty, and makes her eat nice cold boiled potatoes, and so naturally, she simply adores him! A hundred men have written that story, and it's an example of their insane masculine conceit, which I, as a woman, resent. Shakespeare may have started it, with his silly _Taming of the Shrew_. Shakespeare's men may have been real, but his women were dolls, designed to please some majesty. You may not know it, but there are women today who don't live just to please majesties' fancies. If a woman like me were kidnapped, she would go on hating the brute, or if she did give in, then the man would lose anyway, because she would have degenerated; she'd have turned into a slave, and lost exactly the things he'd liked in her. Oh, you cavemen! With your belief that you can force women to like you! I have more courage than any of you!" "I admit you have courage, but you'd have still more, if you bucked the wilds." "Nonsense! In New York I face every day a hundred complicated problems you don't know I ever heard of!" "Let me remind you that Brer Julius Cæsar said he'd rather be mayor in a little Spanish town than police commissioner in Rome. I'm king in Schoenstrom, while you're just one of a couple hundred thousand bright people in New York----" "Really? Oh, at least a million. Thanks!" "Oh--gee--Claire, I didn't mean to be personal, and get in a row and all, but--can't you see--kind of desperate--Seattle so soon----" Her face was turned from him; its thin profile was firm as silver wire. He blundered off into silence and--they were at it again! "I didn't mean to make you angry," he gulped. "Well, you did! Bullying---- You and your men of granite, in mackinaws and a much-needed shave, trying to make a well-bred woman satisfied with a view consisting of rocks and stumps and socks on the line! Let me tell you that compared with a street canyon, a mountain canyon is simply dead, and yet these unlettered wild men----" "See here! I don't know if you're firing these adjectives at me, but I don't know that I'm so much more unlettered---- You talked about taking French in your finishing-school. Well, they taught American in mine!" "They would!" Then he was angry. "Yes, and chemistry and physics and Greek and Latin and history and mathematics and economics, and I took more or less of a whirl at all of them, while you were fiddling with ribbons, and then I had to buck mechanics and business methods." "I also 'fiddled' with manners--an unfortunate omission in your curriculum, I take it! You have been reasonably rude----" "So have you!"