“I allude,” said Mr Brown, “to a world reconsecrated, through the political enfranchisement of woman, to reason, justice and purity. Everything, you will grant, is wrong as it is. Civilization, as a male imposition, has proved itself a depressing failure. Men, on true premises, labour to false conclusions; women, on false, jump to true. Their unerring moral sensitiveness penetrates all massed and complicated sophistries, and pierces in a flash to the heart of the real. Unbiassed by formulas, untrammelled by dogma, they will blow through our corrupt institutions like a cleansing gale, whirling the dead leaves of discredited systems before them. Woman is not conscientious, so to speak, in the prescriptive sense. She will strip from equity, justice and the moral law the trappings in which they have been too long confounded, and show us nature again, primitive and fearless.” “Indeed?” said Gilead. “You surprise me.” “There will be many surprises when the time comes,” said Mr Brown grandiloquently; and, on the very word, suffered a surprising change of countenance. “Why, why,” he cried, flushing scarlet; “my letter--my letter, sir, in which I expatiated at some length on this very subject. You have not seen it, you say? To what, then, am I to attribute the honour of your visit?” “To an advertisement, sir,” said Gilead quietly, “about a dog.” The effect of his words was startling. Mr Brown seemed to burst at the head, like an over-charged bottle of ginger-beer, and thence to spout a volume of incoherent expletives. He then, as if impelled by some uncontrollable emotion, went racing up and down the room, until, the pressure slacking, he gradually slowed, and finally came to a stop opposite his visitor, the steam, so to speak, all out of him. “I see it all,” he said, in a state of the limpest depression. “By an irony of circumstance scarce credible, the sympathies I sought to engage have been forestalled by my own child in a trivial matter.” “By a young friend of your child, sir, if I am correctly informed,” said Gilead kindly. “You mean the boy Wimble?” said Mr Brown bitterly. “No doubt, sir, your information--” “It was at first hand,” put in the visitor, smiling. “I met the young people outside, and got into talk with them. The boy, he himself confessed to me, composed and inserted the advertisement.” “The grotesque impertinence of it!” cried Mr Brown, boiling over; “the assurance and the inopportuneness!” “I understand,” said Gilead, “that you authorized the little lady to find, if possible, a home for the animal?” “Go on, sir, go on!” said Mr Brown resignedly. “Tell me that I authorized her to hold her father up to ridicule before the world.” “Nay, sir,” said Gilead, “I am quite at sea in the matter.”