"Oh, dear, yes. Since he was three months old, he's been brought up as Pip was. But perhaps 'Great Expectations' was not among your books read." "No; but I suppose you mean your baby's brought up by hand? But I can't think how you could bear to put him away from you if it wasn't actually needful. Why, my heart's broken only to think that in a month or so more my baby will not depend upon me, humanly, for all her little life." "Ah, plainly you have a vocation to be a mother. I haven't; and if I had to care for Mill in all things, it would be simple slavery to me. But it must be a great step from art to the nursery too." "That means a step _down_. I suppose I should have thought so once, but never since I held my baby in my arms, and she's a far more wonderful creation to me than any old master's cherub I ever copied. And not my baby alone, but all babies. I never pass one in the street now, ever so ugly or dirty, without a warm feeling for it, and no charity opens my purse so quickly as a _crêche_, or a foundling, or orphan asylum. I could have been very happy as an artist always. Art is full of the noblest strength and compensations, and I own that the ordinary life of the English Philistine is irksome to me to the last degree; but what should I do now without a husband and child? And what would I not give up or bear for them? You see I'm only a very humdrum woman, Mrs. Malise." "Whatever I see, I don't despair of winning you over to our side. I think it only needs that this great movement for woman's freedom and enlightenment, all that underlies it, all it implies, be fairly brought before you, to receive your assent and coöperation. And, to be unwisely frank, perhaps, it is such women as you we ought to gain, must gain--women of sentiment, tenderness, tact, suave manner--sympathetic women, to bring a gracious element into the contest. The workers already in the field have fought so long, against such odds and obloquy, that it is no wonder all the softness, conciliation are gone out of them, and that their aspect and address suggest only warfare, aggressive and unsparing." And so on during the call. I wish I could photograph for you Mrs. Malise's drawing-room. You will not suppose it cumbered with the ordinary pretty feminine litter; but I can tell you Aunt Janet's sewing-room couldn't begin to rival it in grim dead-in-earnestness: straight up and down chairs that mean work; a writing-table big enough for a board-room, and fitted with suitably mighty writing implements; a slippery green leather couch upon which no laziness could be so desperate as to court repose; books lining one wall, and papers, stacks of papers everywhere--manuscripts and newspapers; no ornaments, unless a clock, a Cleopatra's needle in black marble, a skull, a wild-eyed, shock-headed oil portrait of a man I guessed to be the father of my hostess, and photographs of Mill, Mazzini, and Swinbourne be considered decorative.