"I do not doubt it," said Hester. "What I do doubt is, that you have had any experience of the sort necessary to set things right between lord Gartley and myself. The fact is, for I will be perfectly open with you, that I saw then--for the first time plainly, that to marry him would be to lose my liberty." "Not more, my dear, than every woman does who marries at all. I presume you will allow marriage and its duties to be the natural calling of a woman?" "Certainly." "Then she ought not to complain of the loss of her liberty." "Not of so much as is naturally involved in _marriage_, I allow." "Then why draw back from your engagement to Gartley?" "Because he requires me to turn away at once, and before any necessity shows itself, from the exercise of a higher calling yet." "I am not aware of any higher calling." "I am. God has given me gifts to use for my fellows, and use them I must till he, not man, stops me. That is my calling." "But you know that of necessity a woman must give up many things when she accepts the position of a wife, and possibly the duties of a mother." "The natural claims upon a wife or mother I would heartily acknowledge." "Then of course to the duties of a wife belong the claims Society has upon her as a wife." "So far as I yet know what is meant in your circle by such claims, I count them the merest usurpations: I will never subject myself to such--never put myself in a position where I should be expected to obey a code of laws not merely opposed to the work for which I was made, but to all the laws of the relations to each other of human beings as human beings." "I do not quite understand you," said Miss Vavasor. "Well, for instance," returned Hester, willing to give the question a general bearing, "a mother in your class, according at least to much that I have heard, considers the duties she owes to society, duties that consist in what looks to me the merest dissipation and killing of time, as paramount even to those of a mother. Because of those 'traditions of men,' or fancies of fashionable women rather, she justifies herself in leaving her children in the nursery to the care of other women--the vulgarest sometimes." "Not knowingly," said Miss Vavasor. "We are all liable to mistakes." "But certainly," insisted Hester, "without taking the pains necessary to know for themselves the characters of those to whom they trust the children God has given to their charge; whereas to abandon them to the care of angels themselves would be to go against the laws of nature and the calling of God." Miss Vavasor began to think it scarcely desirable to bring a woman of such levelling opinions into their quiet circle: she would be preaching next that women were wicked who did not nurse their own brats! But she would be faithful to Gartley! "To set up as reformers would be to have the whole hive about our ears," she said.