“And you may trust to the women themselves to see that no one of their own sex has a monopoly of power,” added, caustically, Mr. Cotton. “You are hard upon us women,” pleaded Priscilla. “Women have their weaknesses as well as men theirs, but they can love and admire beauty in their own sex, as much as they do ugliness in men. I do not suppose that placing them on an equality in all respects with men will increase their power as women, but it will increase their power as reasonable human beings. I think woman would lose much of her peculiar power as woman over man, and this I should by no means regret. I would break down the tyranny of sex as I would that of caste or class. I would have men and women so trained, that they could meet, converse, or act together as simple human beings, without ever recurring, even in thought, to the difference of sex.” “That,” said the young worshipper of woman, “would be cruel. It would be like spreading a pall over the sun, or extinguishing the lamp of life. Even the garden of Eden —— was a wild, And man the hermit sighed, till woman smil’d.” “As long as I remember my mother or my sister,” said Mr. Merton, “I would never meet a woman, however high or however humble, without taking note of the fact that she is a woman.” “Things are best as God made them,” added Mr. Cotton. “Men and women have each their peculiar character and sphere. Women would gain nothing by exchanging the petticoat for the breeches, or men by exchanging the breeches for the petticoat.” “But I wish,” said Leila, poutingly, “to be treated as a reasonable being, and that the young gentlemen who do me the honor to address me would treat me as if I had common sense. I do not want compliments paid to my hands and feet, my face, lips, nose, eyes, and eyebrows.” “And yet,” said I, “my sweet Leila, they are well worth complimenting.” She smiled, and seemed not displeased. “I suspect,” remarked Mr. Cotton, with his Puritan slyness, “that the young lady finds the affluence of such compliments more endurable than she would their absence.” “I do not deal much in compliments,” said Mr. Merton, “but I do not much fancy persons who are always wise, and never open their mouths without giving utterance to some grave maxim for the conduct of life. There is a time to be silly as well as a time to be wise. Life is made up of little things, and he is a sad moralist who has no leniency for trifles. I love myself to look upon a pretty face, and find no great objection to those pleasant nothings which are the current coin of well-bred conversation between the sexes. Even a gallant speech, a happily-turned compliment, when it brings no blush to the cheek of modesty, is quite endurable.” “I thought you were a parson, Mr. Merton,” said Priscilla, “and am surprised to find you so tolerant of what it is said your cloth generally condemns.”