“Miss Ducharme, if you fell into the river it would be only human for me to fish you out. Drowning isn’t the worst thing there is. Folks who would jump into the water after you would stand by and let trouble come to you which would make you wish you could drown. A man has the right to interfere. Humanity gives it to him. It’s silly to think I have the right to save your life from a physical danger, but haven’t the right to save you from the other kind. You say it’s none of my business. It is my business. What threatens any human being is the business of every other human being, if he weren’t too lazy or too hidebound or too conventional to admit it. You have brains—or you wouldn’t be in the state of mind you are. You know logic when you meet it face to face—and that was logic. The trouble with you is ambition that has fermented in the can.” “You are a bumptious young man,” she said, hotly. “You’re full of school-book theories. What do you know about a woman? About her problems? What do you know about anything? You haven’t lived yet. I’m a dozen years older than you—in knowing what the world is. You talked idealistic nonsense the other day about the good there is in the world; you’re talking idealistic nonsense to-day. You’re a cub altruist. What you think is humanitarianism is merely impertinence. Altruism is just a word in the dictionary.” “I knew you had brains,” said Jim, “and I’ll bet you disagree with Mrs. Stickney about woman’s sphere. She says every woman ought to be bossed by a man—and shouldn’t be allowed the vote till she’s a grandmother.” “I don’t agree. A woman is an individual, complete—she needs no man for a complement. Her abilities are as great, her potentialities as strong, She has the right to own herself, to guard herself, to reach out for the life she wants as a man does. Because her risk in life is greater she has the right to more than equality; she has the right to special privilege and special protection. She has the right to demand that she be put in a condition where she can protect her treasures, material, physical, spiritual. And how can she do it as things are? Less than half the world—in trousers—holds the majority in captivity, exercising the rights of conquerors. You make laws to bind us. Men make laws respecting the peculiar problems of women—when men know less of women and their problems than they do of the mound-builders. We don’t ask to make your laws—only men can make laws for men; but we do demand to make our own laws. We demand that weapons be placed in our hands for our own defense. With some of the theories I do not agree, but I do insist that women should not be left—in the condition they are now—as the women of a sacked city, at the mercy of the conquerors.” “You have thought, haven’t you? Perhaps not altogether healthily, but keenly. Dinner-table conversations won’t be trite.”