'You are not in a hurry?' she said.
'Oh no.'
'You're going to spend the evening with me like a good man? Then I'll ask them to let us have tea.' She rang the bell and Ruby came in, and the tea was ordered. 'That young lady tells me that you are an old friend of hers.'
'I've known about her down in the country, and was astonished to find her here yesterday.'
'There's some lover, isn't there;--some would-be husband whom she does not like?'
'And some won't-be husband, I fear, whom she does like.'
'That's quite of course, if the other is true. Miss Ruby isn't the girl to have come to her time of life without a preference. The natural liking of a young woman for a man in a station above her, because he is softer and cleaner and has better parts of speech,--just as we keep a pretty dog if we keep a dog at all,--is one of the evils of the inequality of mankind. The girl is content with the love without having the love justified, because the object is more desirable. She can only have her love justified with an object less desirable. If all men wore coats of the same fabric, and had to share the soil of the work of the world equally between them, that evil would come to an end. A woman here and there might go wrong from fantasy and diseased passions, but the ever-existing temptation to go wrong would be at an end.'
'If men were equal to-morrow and all wore the same coats, they would wear different coats the next day.'
'Slightly different. But there would be no more purple and fine linen, and no more blue woad. It isn't to be done in a day of course, nor yet in a century,--nor in a decade of centuries; but every human being who looks into it honestly will see that his efforts should be made in that direction. I remember; you never take sugar; give me that.'
Neither had he come here to discuss the deeply interesting questions of women's difficulties and immediate or progressive equality. But having got on to these rocks,--having, as the reader may perceive, been taken on to them wilfully by the skill of the woman,--he did not know how to get his bark out again into clear waters. But having his own subject before him, with all its dangers, the wild-cat's claws, and the possible fate of the gentleman in Oregon, he could not talk freely on the subjects which she introduced, as had been his wont in former years. 'Thanks,' he said, changing his cup. 'How well you remember!'