“Thank you,” she would have said, “I’ll trouble you to leave this garden as quickly as you entered it and take them with you. I’m not that sort of girl.” Marguerite clings to the jewels, and accepts the young man’s arm for a moonlight promenade. And when it does enter into her innocent head that he and she have walked that shady garden long enough, what does she do when she has said good-bye and shut the door? She opens the ground-floor window and begins to sing! Maybe I am not poetical, but I do like justice. When other girls do these sort of things they get called names. I cannot see why this particular girl should be held up as an ideal. She kills her mother. According to her own account this was an accident. It is not an original line of defence, and we are not allowed to hear the evidence for the prosecution. She also kills her baby. You are not to blame her for that, because at the time she was feeling poorly. I don’t see why this girl should have a special line of angels to take her up to heaven. There must have been decent, hard-working women in Nürnburg more entitled to the ticket. Why is it that all these years we have been content to accept Marguerite as a type of innocence and virtue? The explanation is, I suppose, that Goethe wrote at a time when it was the convention to regard all women as good. Anything in petticoats was virtuous. If she did wrong it was always somebody else’s fault. _Cherchez la femme_ was a later notion. In the days of Goethe it was always _Cherchez l’homme_. It was the man’s fault. It was the devil’s fault. It was anybody’s fault you liked, but not her’s. The convention has not yet died out. I was reading the other day a most interesting book by a brilliant American authoress. Seeing I live far away from the lady’s haunts, I venture to mention names. I am speaking of “Patience Sparhawk,” by Gertrude Atherton. I take this book because it is typical of a large body of fiction. Miss Sparhawk lives a troubled life: it puzzles her. She asks herself what is wrong. Her own idea is that it is civilisation. If it is not civilisation, then it is the American man or Nature—or Democracy. Miss Sparhawk marries the wrong man. Later on she gets engaged to another wrong man. In the end we are left to believe she is about to be married to the right man. I should be better satisfied if I could hear Miss Sparhawk talking six months after that last marriage. But if a mistake has again been made I am confident that, in Miss Sparhawk’s opinion, the fault will not be Miss Sparhawk’s. The argument is always the same: Miss Sparhawk, being a lady, can do no wrong. If Miss Sparhawk cared to listen to me for five minutes, I feel I could put her right on this point.