“Well, count, one like you might invest in the Dykes-Delano paper, and still have a balance for our little insurance enterprise.” The count did not at all like the covert sneer in this speech. “Kendrick,” he said, “your heart is as dry and crisp as one of your bank-notes. It is not touched at all by the struggle of these women, while to me it is inspiring. You never even told me of it, and I have had to learn the facts outside. They commenced with absolutely nothing but a few plants in a friend’s bay-window. One of them sold her watch and jewels, I hear, to help build the second addition to the hot-house. I tell you, they ought to be encouraged and helped in every way.” “Pity they couldn’t have kept respectability on their side. That would have been the best help,” said Mrs. Burnham. Old Burnham could have choked her; not that he had more charity than his wife, but more policy. “Respectability!” said the count, thoroughly aroused. “I wonder that women do not hate the very word. No woman ever becomes worthy of herself until she finds out what a sham it is—a very bugbear to frighten slaves. No woman knows her strength until she has had to battle with the cry of ‘strong-minded,’ ‘out-of-her-sphere,’ ‘unfeminine,’ and all the other weapons of weak and hypocritical antagonists. I tell you, a woman who has fought that fight, and conquered an independent position by her own industry, has attractions in the eyes of a true man, as much above the show of little graces, polite accomplishments, meretricious toilet arts, and the gabble of inanities, as heaven is above the earth. She is a woman whom no man can hold by wealth or social position, but only by the love his devotion and manliness can inspire.” No dissenting word followed this burst, which was Greek to the solid men. The count was a little daft anyway, on the subject of women, according to them. Mrs. Kendrick, after a moment, offered some safe, negative remark, and Burnham, anxious to neutralize the mischief his wife had done, said he thought a woman might, at least some women might, “work up” a business and yet remain feminine. Men were not so hard on women, it was their own sex. This roused Mrs. Burnham, for she knew well he talked very differently in the bosom of his family. She took up the thread of conversation. “I am sure,” she said—and here occurred a little jerky interruption to her speech, the cause of which no one knew but her lord, who had kicked her foot under the table, which meant, in his delicate, marital sign language, “Hold your tongue!” But like many of the slaves, as the doctor called married women, she made up in perversity what she lacked in independence; so glancing spitefully at her “lord,” she continued, “I am sure I think women have a right to all the money they can honestly gain, and if Miss Dykes had conducted herself properly, I should have much sympathy with her success.”