“I’m not satisfied,” I said; “I’m only hopeful. But it irritates me when I hear people talk as though man had been born a white-souled angel and was making supernatural efforts to become a sinner. That seems to me the way to discourage him. What he wants is bucking up; somebody to say to him, ‘Bravo! why, this is splendid! Just think, my boy, what you were, and that not so very long ago—an unwashed, hairy savage; your law that of the jungle, your morals those of the rabbit-warren. Now look at yourself—dressed in your little shiny hat, your trousers neatly creased, walking with your wife to church on Sunday! Keep on—that’s all you’ve got to do. In a few more centuries your own mother Nature won’t know you.’ “You women,” I continued; “why, a handful of years ago we bought and sold you, kept you in cages, took the stick to you when you were not spry in doing what you were told. Did you ever read the history of Patient Griselda?” “Yes,” said Robina, “I have.” I gathered from her tone that the Joan of Arc expression had departed. Had Primgate wanted to paint her at that particular moment I should have suggested Katherine—during the earlier stages—listening to a curtain lecture from Petruchio. “Are you suggesting that all women should take her for a model?” “No,” I said, “I’m not. Though were we living in Chaucer’s time I might; and you would not think it even silly. What I’m impressing upon you is that the human race has yet a little way to travel before the average man can be regarded as an up-to-date edition of King Arthur—the King Arthur of the poetical legend, I mean. Don’t be too impatient with him.” “Thinking what a beast he has been ought to make him impatient himself with himself,” considered Robina. “He ought to be feeling so ashamed of himself as to be willing to do anything.” The owl in the old yew screamed, whether with indignation or amusement I cannot tell. “And woman,” I said, “had the power been hers, would she have used it to sweeter purpose? Where is your evidence? Your Cleopatras, Pompadours, Jezebels; your Catherines of Russia, late Empresses of China; your Faustines of all ages and all climes; your Mother Brownriggs; your Lucretia Borgias, Salomes—I could weary you with names. Your Roman task-mistresses; your drivers of lodging-house slaveys; your ladies who whipped their pages to death in the Middle Ages; your modern dames of fashion, decked with the plumage of the tortured grove. There have been other women also—noble women, their names like beacon-lights studding the dark waste of history. So there have been noble men—saints, martyrs, heroes. The sex-line divides us physically, not morally. Woman has been man’s accomplice in too many crimes to claim to be his judge. ‘Male and female created He them’—like and like, for good and evil.” By good fortune I found a loose match. I lighted a fresh cigar. “Dick, I suppose, is the average man,” said Robina.