“‘Sylvia,’ she answered, ‘you put things so strangely, you use such horribly crude language, I don’t know how to talk to you!’ (That must be your fault, Mary. I never heard such a charge before.) ‘I can only tell you this--that the wife who permits herself to think about other things than her duty to her husband and her children is taking a frightful risk. She is playing with fire, Sylvia--she will realize too late what it means to set aside the wisdom of her sex, the experience of other women for ages and ages!’ “So there you are, Mary! I am studying another unwritten book, the Maxims of Aunt Varina! “She has found the remedy for my troubles, the cure for my disease of thought--I am to sew! I tell her that I have more clothes than I can wear in a dozen seasons, and she answers, in an awesome voice, ‘There is the little stranger!’ When I point out that the little stranger will be expected to have a ‘layette’ costing many thousands of dollars, she replies, ‘They will surely permit him to wear some of the things his mother’s hands have made.’ So, behold me, seated on the gallery, learning fancy stitches--and with Kautsky on the Social Revolution hidden away in the bottom of my sewing-bag!” 3. The weeks passed. The legislature at Albany adjourned, without regard to our wishes; and so, like the patient spider whose web is destroyed, we set to work upon a new one. So much money must be raised, so many articles must be written, so many speeches delivered, so many people seized upon and harried and wrought to a state of mind where they were dangerous to the future career of legislators. Such is the process of social reform under the private property régime; a process which the pure and simple reformers imagine we shall tolerate for ever--God save us! Sylvia asked me for the news, and I told it to her--how we had failed, and what we had to do next. So pretty soon there came by registered mail a little box, in which I found a diamond ring. “I cannot ask him for money just now,” she explained, “but here is something that has been mine from girlhood. It cost about four hundred dollars--this for your guidance in selling it. Not a day passes that I do not see many times that much wasted; so take it for the cause.” Queen Isabella and her jewels! In this letter she told me of a talk she had had with her husband on the “woman-problem.” She had thought at first that it was going to prove a helpful talk--he had been in a fairer mood than she was usually able to induce. “He evaded some of my questions,” she explained, “but I don’t think it was deliberate; it is simply the evasive attitude of mind which the whole world takes. He says he does not think that women are inferior to men, only that they are different; the mistake is for them to try to become _like_ men. It is the old proposition of ‘charm,’ you see. I put that to him, and he admitted that he did like to be ‘charmed.’ “I said, ‘You wouldn’t, if you knew as much about the process as I do.’