“If you want to go, why—why in thunder don’t you go?” he said, boyishly. She flashed a gleam of scorn upon him. “I’m a girl—a girl—the most helpless, most defenseless, most easily damaged thing under the sun. Why don’t I go?” Her tone snapped with scorn. “What would I do? Who would take me in? What would become of me? Here I’m safe. I may die of it, but I’m safe. It might be less hideously barren if I weren’t. I’m alone. I’ve been alone since I was fifteen. Some day it’ll be too much for me and I’ll go. But I won’t be fooled into it. I’ll go with my eyes open, knowing why I go. If I go nobody’ll be to blame—except Diversity—for I’ll have made my choice deliberately. Don’t look shocked. I suppose there have been millions of others before me who had the same choice to make. I’m not unique. You men have made the world, and when you get a glimpse of it once in a while you’re shocked.” “Miss”—Jim paused and bit his finger in bewilderment—“I don’t just know what you’re accusing us men of, nor the world in general. But I’ve lived a bit more than you. I’ve lived enough to know this—that there’s more good than evil. There are more folks who are trying to do right than who deliberately do wrong. I know that even in the bad ones there’s more good than bad. I believe if you were to take all the law and machinery of the law, all the police, all the social protection out of the world to-day, that to-morrow the force for right which is in the world would assert itself. There is so much more good than bad in the world that the bad would be held down by the mere weight of the good. You hear about the evil, because the evil thing is news, something to talk about, something to make readers for the newspapers. And it’s news because it’s out of the normal. So there seems to be a lot more bad than there is. Goodness is normal—so normal that nobody notices it.” “Men always defend themselves plausibly.” “I’m not defending men; I’m defending humanity.” She fell silent, and gazed past him again to the twinkling blue of the lake. When she spoke it was less hardily, more wistfully than she had spoken before: “The world is so big and so interesting. In any direction, if my eyes reached far enough, they would see something thrilling. To think there is so much—and I am refused a crumb!” “I’m afraid something has happened to disturb you.” She laughed shortly. “If something should I’d thank Heaven for it! It’s all so drowsy, so placid, and I’m tied to it as if to a stake, with a slow fire lighted round me.” “But if you want to go so badly, if life here is so unendurable, what ties you to it?” “The trifling accident of having been born a girl, added to the trifling episode of having lost my parents, added to the inconsequential condition that the forty dollars a month I get for teaching school is all that stands between me and starvation.” She turned abruptly from him and started down the knoll. He followed.