"Abstractly true, my dear child; but, from the beginning of time, people have meddled; and, since gossip she must, even Eve chatted too freely with serpents. Besides, since we are in the world, we should not turn eremites, and bristle at the sight of one of our own race; for society has a few laws that are inexorable,--that cannot be violated without subjecting the offender to being stung to death by venomous tongues; and one of these statutes is, that all shall see and be seen, shall talk and be talked about, and shall visit and be visited. When a woman unaccountably turns recluse, she is at the mercy of public imagination, stimulated by disappointed curiosity; and very soon the verdict goes forth that she is either deformed or deranged." "I dispute the prerogative of the public to dictate in such matters, and I shall rebel whenever it presumes to lay even a little finger across my path. What, pray tell me, is the world, but an aggregation of persons like you and me, and what possible concern can you or I have with the fact that Mrs. Gerome burrows like a mole, beyond our sight? If she sees fit to found a modern sect of Troglodytes, I can't understand that the wheels of society are thereby scotched, or that the public has a shadow of right to raise a hue-and-cry and strive to unearth her, as if she were a fox, a catamount, or a gopher. It is useless for society to constitute itself a turning-lathe for rounding off all individual angularities, and grinding people down to dull uniformity until they are as indistinguishable as a bag of unpainted marbles or of black-eyed peas; and, if God had intended that we should all invariably think, feel, and act after one pattern, He would have populated the world with Siamese twins; whereas, the first couple that were born on earth were so dissimilar that all the universe was not wide enough to hold them both, and manslaughter began when the race only numbered a quartette. If mankind had not arrogated the privilege of being its 'brother's keeper,' it would never have been forced to deny the fact. I admire the honesty and truth with which Alexander Smith bravely confessed, 'I love a little eccentricity; I respect honest prejudices. It is high time, it seems to me, that a moral game-law were passed for the preservation of the wild and vagrant feelings of human nature.'" "That is a dangerous doctrine, my dear child, especially for a woman to entertain; because custom rules us with an iron rod, and flays us alive if we contravene her decrees."