Mr. Merton shrugged his shoulders and said nothing; Mr. Cotton looked black, was scandalized, and muttered, “Rank infidelity.” “And what else,” said a very gentlemanly young man, who had been talking nonsense for an hour to a bevy of young ladies in a corner of the room, and apparently indifferent to the great matters under discussion, “and what else did his reverence expect in a company of reformers? Yet we are not really infidels. We have only thrown off the mask, and ceased to be hypocrites. Whatever man’s profession, ever since it was said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone,’ and Eve was brought blushing to his bower, woman has been the real shrine at which he has worshipped. This is our ancestral religion, and true to the religion of my fathers, I make woman my Divinity, and lay my offering at Leila’s feet.” “Do not believe him,” said a saucy young thing, with a sparkling eye and pouting lips. “He worships only himself. Here I have been this half hour trying to convince him that there is something mystic in woman, and that science and religion, as now organized, are false and mischievous, because they are the product of man’s genius alone. I have said all the flattering things I could to make him take up the cause of Woman’s Rights, and he has only laughed at me.” “You wrong me, fair and adorable Leila; woman reigns supreme now, and we are slaves; what more can she ask?” “She should be elevated to be the equal of man,” said Leila. “Lowered, my Leila would say,” replied the young gentleman. “And placed in the possession of the same political franchises, have the right to vote at all elections, and be declared eligible to any and every office political, civil, or military,” continued Leila, without heeding the interruption. “But that,” said Mr. Merton, “would be hardly fair to us men, and would moreover be dangerous to republican liberty. Mademoiselle Leila would of course be a candidate for the Assembly. All the young men would vote for her, because they would secure her good graces, and all the old men would do the same, in order to prove that they are not old, and have not yet lost their sensibility to female loveliness and worth; she would be elected unanimously. In the Assembly she would rise to propose some measure, throw aside her veil, beam forth upon us with all her charms, and for the same reasons all would support her. She would reign as a despot, which, as a republican, I must protest against.” “She might have rivals; all men do not see with the same eyes,” sagely remarked a venerable spinster, with a dried and withered form and face, puckering up her mouth, and endeavoring to look killing.” “That is well thought of,” said Mr. Merton. “Besides,” added Mr. Winslow, “the votes of the women would be as numerous as those of the men, and might be thrown for a candidate of the other sex.”