"She's not a child. She's twenty-six. I should dissuade my wife, too, from reading it." "Then your wife," answered Marie, "would miss an illuminating piece of literature." Elizabeth came in with her serene voice. "Don't you think, Judge Black, that we all acquire a habit of judging a writer, whom we haven't yet had time to study for ourselves, too much in terms of some review or other, or of the mere unthinking, current talk? I think we all do it. I believe when you read Ibsen you will feel differently about him." "Not I!" said the Judge. "I have seen extracts enough. I tell you, Miss Eden, the age is reading too much of such decadent stuff--" "Oh, 'decadent'!" "And it is read, amazingly, by women. I would rather see my wife or daughter with the old dramatists at their worst in their hands than with stuff like that--! Overturning all our concepts, criticizing supremacies--I beg your pardon, Miss Caton, but if you knew how women, nowadays, amaze me--" "Stop hectoring, Black," said the General mellowly. "She's not in the dock. Just so that women stay women, they can fill their heads with what stuff they will--" "Exactly!" said Judge Black. "Do you see them staying women?" "Women of the past," said Elizabeth. "That is woman,--the women of the past. There isn't any other. The eternal feminine--" "I think you are limiting the eternal and denying the universe power to evolve," said Elizabeth. "Why not eternally the man of the past? Why not 'There isn't any other'? Why not 'The eternal masculine'? Why do you change and grow from age to age?" "I'm not so sure that they do," said Marie _sotto voce_. "Yes, they do! They grow and become freer always; though I think," said Elizabeth painfully, "that they lag in the way they look at women.--Well, if you grow, being one half, do you suppose that we are not going to grow, being the other half? And if you think that the principle of growth is not in us, still I shouldn't worry! If we can't grow, we won't grow, and you needn't fash yourselves. On the other hand, if we can, we will--and that is all there is about it. And it wouldn't do you the least harm to read Ibsen--nor to get another definition of 'decadent.'" She leaned forward in her chair. "Do you see that strip of blanched grass there?--or rather it was blanched yesterday when that board over there was lying upon it and had lain, I don't know how long!--blanched and bent and sicklied over. Now look! It is getting colour and standing straight--only beginning, but it is beginning--beginning to be on terms with the sun! Well, that grass is woman to-day! The heavy board is being lifted, and that's the change and all the change--and you find it 'pernicious'!"