"In the first place, then, exactly the same education with my brothers. I hear of colleges now, somewhere far out west, where a brother and sister may go through the same course together; that would have suited me. I am impatient of half-education. I am by nature very thorough and exact. I want to be sure of doing whatever I undertake as well as it can be done. I don't want to be flattered and petted for pretty ignorance. I don't want to be tolerated in any half way, slovenly work of any kind because I am a woman. When I have a thorough general education, I then want to make professional studies. I have a great aptitude for medicine. I have a natural turn for the care of sick, and am now sent for far and near as one of the best advisers and watchers in case of sickness. In that profession I don't doubt I might do great good, be very happy, have a cheerful home of own, and a pleasant life-work; but I don't want to enter it half taught. I want to be able to do as good work as any man's; to be held to the same account, and receive only what I can fairly win." "But, Caroline, a man's life includes so much drudgery." "And does not mine? Do you suppose that the care of all the house and dairy, the oversight of all my father's home affairs, is no drudgery? Much of it is done with my own hands, because no other work than mine can content me. But when you and I went to school together, it was just so: you know I worked out my own problems and made my own investigations. Now all that is laid aside; at least, all my efforts are so hap-hazard and painfully incomplete, that it is discouraging to me." "But would not your father consent?" "My father is a man wedded to the past, and set against every change in ideas. I have tried to get his consent to let me go and study, and prepare myself to do something worth doing, but he is perfectly immovable. He says I know more now than half the women, and a great deal too much for my good, and that he cannot spare me. At twenty-one he makes no further claim on any of my brothers; their minority comes to an end at a certain period--mine, never." We were walking in the moonlight up and down under the trees by the house. Caroline suddenly stopped. "Cousin," she said, "if you succeed; if you get to be what I hope you will--high in the world, a prosperous editor--speak for the dumb, for us whose lives burn themselves out into white ashes in silence and repression." "I _will_," I said. "You will write to me; I shall rejoice to hear of the world through you--and I shall rejoice in your success," she added. "Caroline," I said, "do you give up entirely wrestling with the angel?" "No; if I did, I should not keep up. I have hope from year to year that something may happen to bring things to my wishes; that I may obtain a hearing with papa; that his sense of justice may be aroused; that I may get Uncle Jacob to do something besides recite verses and compliment me; that your mother may speak for me."