"Oh, these things!... Massage and manicure and primp!--hot baths and lotions and primp!--sleep and a little exercise to make pink cheeks and primp some more. Hours and hours every day just to coddling our little bodies! Isn't it all rather sickening, when you really stop to think?" "I must say," answered Mattie, quite stiffly, "I can see nothing sickening about it. I think it's a woman's duty to look just as well as she can." Carlisle rested her arm on her chair-back, and went on rubbing. "Duty?--I wonder. Duty to whom, do you mean?" "To everybody, to the world, to society." "I was just trying to think," said Cally, "and it's quite fun. I believe I'll do it at least once a week after this.--What would we think of a man who spent four hours a day decorating himself, everlastingly working at himself to look pretty?" Mattie opened her wide eyes yet wider. She was now plaiting her well-brushed hair, and looked very sweet and girlish. "Why, that's a _very_ different thing, Cally! The same qualities aren't expected of men and women--or they couldn't complement each other! Women are _expected_ to be sweet and attractive, while--" "Expected by whom?" quizzed Cally, and screwed the top down on her cold cream (if such, indeed, it was). "By everybody," said Mattie, falling back upon her tried phrase, "by the world, by--" "Why shouldn't it be expected of men to look nice, too, just as much? Why should we have to do the whole performance? Why shouldn't we give some of all this time to something useful, as men do?--cultivating our minds, for instance?" "But don't you _see_, Cally?--that isn't expected of us! Men simply do _not_ care for clever women," cried Mattie, who had built up a considerable social success on that very principle. "Why should we let _them_ decide for us what we're to be? Why?--Why? That's just what they do! We're human beings just as much as they are, aren't we?... Oh, I'm sick of men," cried Cally. "_You're sick of men_!" echoed Mattie, aghast as at a blasphemy. Cally nodded slowly, her lovely eyes on her friend's tremulous face. "Oh, it's the men who make us put in all this time tricking up ourselves to look pretty. You know it, too, for you just gave yourself away.... Oh, Mats, wouldn't it be great to appeal to _somebody_ sometimes in some other way!" Mattie, apparently on the verge of tears, murmured her complete inability to follow Cally's strange talk. Observing her, Carlisle gave a reassuring little laugh and rose abruptly. Not that it made any special difference, but she didn't care about setting her best friend's alert wits too busily to work. "Dear old Mats!--Don't take me so dreadfully _seriously_. It's all what I read in a magazine article to-night before the German, waiting for Robert to come. He thought he was displeased with me, and came very late, on purpose. You don't seem to like it?"