Jennifer: D-d-dear Master Pippin. Martin: They look quite green, don't they? And he laid the two blades side by side on her palm, and Jennifer, whose voice once more would not serve her, nodded and put the two blades in her pocket. Then Martin took out his handkerchief and very carefully dried her eyes and cheeks, saying as he did so, "Now that I have explained this to your satisfaction, won't you, please, explain something to mine?" Jennifer: I will if I can. Martin: Then explain what it is you have against men. Jennifer: I don't know how to tell you, it is so terrible. Martin: I will try to bear it. Jennifer: They say women cannot--cannot-- Martin: Cannot? Jennifer: Keep secrets! Martin: Men say so? Jennifer: Yes! Martin: MEN say so? Jennifer: They do, they do! Martin: Men! Oh, Jupiter! if this were true--but it is not--these men would be blabbing the greatest of secrets in saying so. If I had a secret--but I have not--do you think I would trust it to a man? Not I! What does a man do with a secret? Forgets it, throws it behind him into some empty chamber of his brain and lets the cobwebs smother it! buries it in some deserted corner of his heart, and lets the weeds grow over it! Is this keeping a secret? Would you keep a garden or a baby so? I will a thousand times sooner give my secret to a woman. She will tend it and cherish it, laugh and cry with it, dress it in a new dress every day and dandle it in the world's eye for joy and pride in it--nay, she will bid the whole world come into her nursery to admire the pretty secret she keeps so well. And under her charge a little secret will grow into a big one, with a hundred charms and additions it had not when I confided it to her, so that I shall hardly know it again when I ask for it: so beautiful, so important, so mysterious will it have become in the woman's care. Oh, believe me, Mistress Jennifer, it is women who keep secrets and men who neglect them. Jennifer: If I had only thought of these things to say! But I am not clever at argument like men. Martin: I suspect these clever arguers. They can always find the right thing to say, even if they are in the wrong. Women are not to be blamed for washing their hands of them for ever. Jennifer: I know. Yet I cannot help wondering who bakes them gingerbread for Sunday. Martin: Let them go without. They do not deserve gingerbread. Jennifer: I know, I know. But they like it so much. And it is nice making it, too. Martin: Then I suppose it will have to be made till the last of Sundays. What a bother it all is. Jennifer: I know. Good night, dear Master Pippin. Martin: Dear milkmaid, good night. There lie your fellows, careless of the color of the grass they lie on, and of the years that lie on them. They have forsworn the baking of cakes, the eating of which begets dreams, to which women are not given. Go lie with them, and be if you can as careless and dreamless as they are.