"If a woman isn't a dam-fool already," said Betty, "and I don't think I'm one, she doesn't like to feel that she ever made a dam-fool of herself. She is proud of her instincts and her judgments and the sensitive, emotional intelligence that is hers. When all these seem to have gone wrong, it's pleasing to realise that originally they went right. It soothes one's self-respect, one's pride. I know now that all these blind perceptions in me went straight to certain magnificent essentials--those that make the great, strong, fearless fighting man. That's attractive to a woman, you know. At any rate, to an independent barbarian like myself--" "My dear Betty," I interrupted with a laugh. "You a barbarian? You whom I regard as the last word, the last charming and delightful word, in modern womanhood?" "Of course I'm the child of my century," she cried, flushing. "I want votes, freedom, opportunity for expansion, power--everything that can develop Betty Connor into a human product worthy of the God who made her. But how she could fulfil herself without the collaboration of a man, has baffled her ever since she was a girl of sixteen, when she began to awake to the modern movement. On one side I saw women perfectly happy in the mere savage state of wifehood and motherhood, and not caring a hang for anything else, and on the other side women who threw babies back into limbo and preached of nothing but intellectual and political and economic independence. Oh, I worried terribly about it, Majy, when I was a girl. Each side seemed to have such a lot to say for itself. Then it dawned upon me that the only way out of the dilemma was to combine both ideals--that of the savage woman in skins and the lady professor in spectacles. That is what, allowing for the difference of sex, a man does. Why shouldn't a woman? The woman, of course, has to droop a bit more to the savage, because she has to produce the babies and suckle them, and so forth, and a man hasn't. That was my philosophy of life when I entered the world as a young woman. Love came into it, of course. It was a sanctification of the savagery. I've gone on like this," she laughed, "because I don't want you to protest in your dear old-fashioned way against my calling myself an independent barbarian. I am, and I glory in it. That's why, as I was saying, I'm deeply glad that Leonard Boyce has made good. His honour means a good deal to me--to my self-esteem. I hope," she added, rising and coming to me with a caressing touch. "I hope you've got the hang of the thing now."