"Perhaps it is," said Lydia unsparingly, her latent anger coming to the surface again and furnishing her fluency, "perhaps it is because people who see our faults don't help us to correct them, but flatter us by telling us we haven't any, and all the time think ill of us behind our backs." The lecturer began to answer with aplomb and an attempt at graceful cynicism: "Ah, Madame, put yourself in my place! I am addressing audiences of women. Would it be tactful to--" but under Lydia's honest eyes he faltered, stopped, flushed darkly under his heavy beard, up over his high, narrow forehead to the roots of his gray hair. He swallowed hard. "Madame," he said, "you have rebuked me--deservedly. I--I demand your pardon." "Oh, you needn't mind me," said Lydia humbly; "my opinion doesn't amount to anything. I oughtn't to talk, either. I don't _do_ anything different from the rest--the women downstairs, I mean. I can only see there's something wrong--" She found the other's gaze into her troubled eyes so friendly that she was moved to cry out to him, all her hostility gone: "What _is_ the trouble, anyhow?" The lecturer flushed again, this time touched by her appeal. "I proudly put at your service any reflections I have made--as though you were my daughter. I have a daughter about your age, who is also married--who faces your problems. Madame, you look fatigued--will you not sit down?" He led her to a sofa on one side of the hall and took a seat beside her. "Is not the trouble," he began, "that the women have too much leisure and the men too little--the women too little work, the men too much?" "Oh, yes, yes, yes!" Lydia's meditations had long ago carried her past that point; she was impatient at his taking time to state it. "But how can we change it?" "You cannot change it in a day. It has taken many years to grow. It has seemed to me that one way to change it is by using your leisure differently. Even those women who use their leisure for the best self-improvement have not used it well. Many of my countrymen say that the culture of American women is like a child's idea of ornamentation--the hanging on the outside of all odd bits of broken finery. I have not found it always so. I have met many learned women here, many women more cultivated than my own wife. But listen, Madame, to the words of an old man. Culture is dust and ashes if the spiritual foundations of life are not well laid; and, believe me, it takes two, a man and a woman, to lay those foundations. It can not be done alone." "But how, how--" began Lydia impatiently. "In the only way that anything can be accomplished in this world, by working! Your women have not worked patiently, resolutely, against the desertion of their men. Worse--they have encouraged it! Have you never heard an American, woman say: 'Oh, I can't bear a man around the house! They are so in the way!' Or, 'I let my husband's business alone. I want him to let--'"