"I cannot tell, grandmother. I see all Dora's faults. Mr. Stanhope is certain that she has no faults. Hitherto she has had her own way in everything. Excepting myself, no one has ventured to contradict her. But, then, Dora is over head and ears in love, and love, it is said, makes all things easy to bear and to do.""One thing, girls, amazes me--it is how readily women go to church and promise to love, honor, and obey their husbands, when they never intend to do anything of the kind.""There is a still more amazing thing, Madam," answered Ruth; "that is that men should be so foolish as to think, or hope, they perhaps might do so.""Old-fashioned women used to manage it some way or other, Ruth. But the old-fashioned woman was a very soft-hearted creature, and, maybe, it was just as well that she was.""But Woman's Dark Ages are nearly over, Madam; and is not the New Woman a great improvement on the Old Woman?""I haven't made up my mind yet, Ruth, about the New Woman. I notice one thing that a few of the new kind have got into their pretty heads, and that is, that they ought to have been men; and they have followed up that idea so far that there is now very little difference in their looks, and still less in their walk; they go stamping along with the step of an athlete and the stride of a peasant on fresh plowed fields. It is the most hideous of walks imaginable. The Grecian bend, which you cannot remember, but may have heard of, was a lackadaisical, vulgar walking fad, but it was grace itself compared with the hideous stride which the New Woman has acquired on the golf links or somewhere else.""But men stamp and stride in the same way, grandmother.""A long stride suits a man's anatomy well enough; it does not suit a woman's--she feels every stride she takes, I'll warrant her.""If she plays golf----"
"My dear Ethel, there is no need for her to play golf. It is a man's game and was played for centuries by men only. In Scotland, the home of golf, it was not thought nice for women to even go to the links, because of the awful language they were likely to hear.""Then, grandmother, is it not well for ladies to play golf if it keeps men from using `awful language' to each other)""God love you, child! Men will think what they dare not speak.""If we could only have some new men!" sighed Ethel. "The lover of to-day is just what a girl can pick up; he has no wit and no wisdom and no illusions. He talks of his muscles and smells of cigarettes--perhaps of whisky"--and at these words, Judge Rawdon, accompanied by Mr. Fred Mostyn, entered the room.
The introductions slipped over easily, they hardly seemed to be necessary, and the young man took the chair offered as naturally as if he had sat by the hearth all his life. There was no pause and no embarrassment and no useless polite platitudes; and Ethel's first feeling about her kinsman was one of admiration for the perfect ease and almost instinctive at-homeness with which he took his place.
He had come to his own and his own had received him; that was the situation, a very pleasant one, which he accepted with the smiling trust that was at once the most perfect and polite of acknowledgments.
"So you do not enjoy traveling?" said Judge Rawdon as if continuing a conversation.
