"There it is that you are wiser than we are. You are mistresses of a domain of which men, for the most part, know little or nothing." "Pray what domain may that be?" "One that is all mystery to me--a world of thoughts and sentiments which to most men is a cloudland, an undiscovered country, of which they may possibly recognize the existence, but of whose geography they know nothing." "Why should they be more ignorant of it than women?" "Because they are commonly given over to practicalities, mixed hopelessly with rivalries and ambitions. Even in their highest pursuits, they propose to themselves some definite point to be gained, some object to be achieved; but women are left to the world of their own minds--there they can expatiate at will." "That is a dangerous privilege." "They have leisure to muse on the joys and troubles of life, and explore depths which we bridge over." "Either your mind has very much changed, or I have very much mistaken it. Pardon me, but I fancied that you were like Iago, 'nothing if not critical;' or at least that you sympathized with his slanderous opinions of womankind." "Heaven forbid! What treasonable thought did you suppose me to harbor against the better part of humanity?" "At all events, I never supposed you to believe that the better part of humanity passed their leisure time in metaphysical reveries and abstruse meditations." "You were speaking, just now, of ideals. May not I have mine?" "So your ideal woman is a transcendental philosopher, seated in the midst of your undiscovered cloudland." "Deliver me from such a one! My ideal is full of thought and of feeling; but no one yet ever dreamed of branding her as a philosopher. But why did you think me so very critical? I am hardly old enough yet to make an Iago or a Rochefoucault." "And yet you used always to have some saying of Rochefoucault at your tongue's end." "I detest him, nevertheless, for a French Mephistopheles,--and all his tribe with him." "When I said as much, you always told me that his sayings had a great deal of truth in them." "And have they not a great deal of truth?" "I cannot pretend to know mankind well enough to answer; but I sincerely hope, not much. Life would be worse than a blank if men and women were what he represents them to be." "I think not; for if one cannot learn to be enthusiastic in regard to the actualities of human nature, he can console himself by a boundless faith in its possibilities. And now and then, thank God,--Rochefoucault to the contrary notwithstanding,--one finds the possibility realized." His companion made no reply; and Morton stood for a moment with his eyes bent upon her face, which, to his enamoured fancy, seemed to reflect the calm beauty of the landscape on which she was gazing. He thought of Fanny Euston; he recalled his last evening's conversation with her, and felt blindly impelled to give some form of expression to the feeling which began to master him.