“As I thought,” returned Mandeville. “Now listen. The reason why you feel weariness more than those around you, is solely because your mind is more expansive. Small minds easily find objects: trifles amuse them; but a high soul covets things beyond its daily reach; trifles occupy its aim mechanically; the thought still wanders restless. This is the case with you. Your intellect preys upon itself. You would have been happier if your rank had been less;” Constance winced--(she thought of Godolphin); “for then you would have been ambitious, and aspired to the very rank that now palls upon you.” Mandeville continued-- “You women are at once debarred from public life and yet influence it. You are the prisoners, and yet the despots of society. Have you talents? it is criminal to indulge them in public; and thus, as talent cannot be stifled, it is misdirected in private; you seek ascendency over your own limited circle; and what should have been genius degenerates into cunning. Brought up from your cradles to dissembling your most beautiful emotions--your finest principles are always tinctured with artifice. As your talents, being stripped of their wings are driven to creep along the earth, and imbibe its mire and clay; so are your affections perpetually checked and tortured into conventional paths, and a spontaneous feeling is punished as a deliberate crime. You are untaught the broad and sound principles of life; all that you know of morals are its decencies and forms. Thus you are incapable of estimating the public virtues and the public deficiencies of a brother or a son; and one reason why _we_ have no Brutus, is because _you_ have no Portia. Turkey has its seraglio for the person; but custom in Europe has also a seraglio for the mind.” Constance smiled at the philosopher’s passion; but she was a woman, and she was moved by it. “Perhaps,” said she, “in the progress of events, the state of the women may be improved as well as that of the men.” “Doubtless, at some future stage of the world. And believe me, Lady Erpingham, politician and schemer as you are, that no legislative reform alone will improve mankind: it is the social state which requires reformation.” “But you asked me some minutes since,” said Constance, after a pause, “if the object of my pursuit was religion. I disappointed but not surprised you by my answer.”