I feel as if it were right to ask her as often as I can if she doesn’t consider every one equal; but she always says she doesn’t, and she confesses that she doesn’t think _she’s_ equal to Lady Something-or-Other, who’s the wife of that relation of her father. I try and persuade her all I can that she _is_; but it seems as if she didn’t want to be persuaded, and when I ask her if that superior being is of the same opinion—that Miss Vane isn’t her equal—she looks so soft and pretty with her eyes and says “How can she not be?” When I tell her that this is right down bad for the other person it seems as if she wouldn’t believe me, and the only answer she’ll make is that the other person’s “awfully nice.” I don’t believe she’s nice at all; if she were nice she wouldn’t have such ideas as that. I tell Miss Vane that at Bangor we think such ideas vulgar, but then she looks as though she had never heard of Bangor. I often want to shake her, though she _is_ so sweet. If she isn’t angry with the people who make her feel that way at least I’m angry _for_ her. I’m angry with her brother too, for she’s evidently very much afraid of him, and this gives me some further insight into the subject. She thinks everything of her brother; she thinks it natural she should be afraid of him not only physically—for that is natural, as he’s enormously tall and strong, and has very big fists—but morally and intellectually. She seems unable, however, to take in any argument, and she makes me realise what I’ve often heard—that if you’re timid nothing will reason you out of it. Mr. Vane also, the brother, seems to have the same prejudices, and when I tell him, as I often think it right to do, that his sister’s not his subordinate, even if she does think so, but his equal, and perhaps in some respects his superior, and that if my brother in Bangor were to treat me as he treats this charming but abject creature, who has not spirit enough to see the question in its true light, there would be an indignation-meeting of the citizens to protest against such an outrage to the sanctity of womanhood—when I tell him all this, at breakfast or dinner, he only bursts out laughing so loud that all the plates clatter on the table.