"I think," said Mr. Hargrove, taking a bunch of cherries from the fruit-stand on the library table,--"I think the whole matter may be resolved into this; the ambitious clamours and Amazonian excesses of this epoch, are the inevitable consequence of the rigid tyranny of former ages; which sternly banished women to the numbing darkness of an intellectual night, denying them the legitimate and natural right of developing their faculties by untrammelled exercise. This belief in feminine inferiority is still expressed in Mohammedan lands, by the custom of placing a slate or tablet of marble on a woman's grave, while on that of men a pen or penholder is laid, to indicate that female hearts are mere tablets, on which man writes whatever pleases him best. In sociology, as well as physics and dynamics,--the angle of reflection is always equal to the angle of incidence,--the psychologic rebound is ever in proportion to the mental pressure; one extreme invariably impinges upon the opposite,--and when the pendulum has reached one end of the arc, it must of necessity swing back to the other. In all social revolutions the moderate and reasonable concessions which might have appeased the discontent in its incipiency are gladly tendered much too late in the contest, when the insurgents stung by injustice and conscious of their grievances, refuse all temperate compromise, and run riot. This woman's-rights and woman's-suffrage abomination is no suddenly concocted social bottle of yeast: it has been fermenting for ages, and, having finally blown out the cork, is rapidly leavening the mass of female malcontents."