"Let's cut out bromides," she said. "You (I, also, speak generically)--" "Thanks so much!" "--have pulled enough of your 'superiors' down to share your gutter. It's time now for men to get out of the gutter and come up to us." "You breathe such rarefied air," he objected. He really wished that on a day of such limpid loveliness she would stop undressing life. He liked to be amused, but once in a while Frederica was just a little too amusing, and he was in the faintest degree bored, as one is bored by a delightful and obstreperous child. He gazed dreamily into the spring haze, watched a ripple spread over the lake, and noted a leaning willow dip its flowing fingers into the water. "Did you see that fish jump?" he asked. Frederica gave a disgusted grunt. "Men are all alike. You talk common sense to them and they go to sleep!" [Illustration: "DID YOU SEE THAT FISH JUMP?" HE ASKED. FREDERICA GAVE A DISGUSTED GRUNT] "My dear Freddy," he confessed, "you have enunciated a deep truth. The average poor devil of a male creature, toiling and slaving and digging into common sense to make a living, isn't very keen on having it crammed down his throat on his afternoon out. Not that I am that kind of person. I find your 'common sense' very diverting." A little patch of red burned in her cheeks. "That's what has kept women slaves--'diverting' men! I believe you prefer fools, every one of you." "We like our own kind," he teased her. "Oh," she said, with sudden passion, "I am in earnest, and you won't be serious! This is a real thing to me, this emancipation of women. It means--a new world!" "Yet this world," he began--the world before them, with its blue serenity of a gentle sky, its vitality of bursting buds and warm mists and cool, lapping water; the world of a woman's soul and body--was not this enough for any one? Why struggle for change? Why try to upset the existing order? And Frederica, speaking of such ugly things, was so very upsetting! As she spoke she looked at him with the naked innocence which marks the mind of the reformer--that noble and ridiculous mind which, seeing but one thing, loses so completely its sense of proportion. The facts she flung at him he would have hidden from the eyes of girls. Yet he knew that they were facts.... He had protested that women should trust the chivalry of men, and she had burst out: "Thank you, I prefer to trust the ballot! 'Chivalry,' and women working twelve hours a day in laundries! 'Chivalry,' and women cleaning spittoons in beer-saloons! 'Chivalry,' and prostitution! No, sir! unless his personal interests are concerned, man's '_chivalry_' is a pretty rotten reed for women to lean on!"