"_No!_--Parental Despotism?" "Despotism!" "_Not_ corporal punishment!" "Cor-por-al punishment!" "No Justice for children?" "Love and Authority instead!" "And woman as the mere plaything of man?" "The mere plaything of man!" "Property?" "A chattel!" "Woman's place at home with her children?" "_C'est ça!_" "By--Jove!" Cosimo whistled. "Yes, I thought I should surprise you," said Amory, with quiet satisfaction. "Surprise!--I'm thunderstruck!" "You didn't know you'd been lunching in a regular museum of it all, did you?" "A museum? A catacomb!" "You wouldn't suppose that we lived in this Year of Grace, would you?" "About 1100, _I_ should have said." "Oh no," Amory interrupted, "under Feudalism it would have been all right. It would have been proper to their stage of development. But--to-day! Or rather next April, I should say----!" "The hands of the clock are to be set back in April?" "So the doctor says. I dare say his rule-of-thumb carries him as far as that." "Awful impostors, doctors." Then Amory spoke slowly and impressively.--"What I want to know is, how much longer _can_ Individualism last? We heard that American lady last year; would you have thought it _possible_ that the system could have survived such a slashing attack? When _will_ people begin to have even a rudimentary conception of the function of the State in these matters? When _will_ they see, for instance, that when a dispute arises between a parent and a child the case is exactly like any other dispute, with the plaintiff on one side and the defendant on the other? If the parent's the plaintiff, how can he speak for the defendant as well? Why, it's making him judge and executioner and all the lot!... And those, Cosimo," she went on, with still deeper gravity, into which contempt crept, "are my aunt's and uncle's ideas! Violence, harshness, and repression. Russianizing the Home, instead of abolishing it altogether, or only allowing it under the very strictest inspection, in such cases as when a parent has really proved his fitness for Child-culture! The Home!... Oh, when _will_ the dawn come?" She turned up the pretty eyes to the sky; she spoke passionately. "Aunt Jerry fit to be a Mother of the Race! Why," she broke out witheringly--"has she (to begin with the very elements) a notion of what to feed a child on? Does she know what a proteid is? Does she know what albumen is? Has she as much as seen a bit of yeast under the microscope? (I have; a girl once showed me.) Doesn't she choose her very feeding-bottles out of these awful circulars of Dorothy's or whose ever they are? And the clothes she showed us!... Ribbons, pink if it's a girl and blue if it's a boy! This hateful insistence on sex from the very beginning! From before the beginning!... And the pride of these people in their ignorance and conceit! Bursting with it!"...