dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life. If you _can_ create
yourselves into any of these great creators, why have you not? Do not ask
me to say otherwise; because if you do, you will lead me into temptation.
For I swore early in life never to utter a falsehood, and, above all, a
sycophantic falsehood; and, in the false homage of the modern press towards
women, there is horrible sycophancy. It is as hollow, most of it, and it is
as fleeting as is the love that lurks in _uxoriousness_. Yet, if a woman
asks me to tell a faleshood, I have long made up my mind--that on moral
considerations I _will_, and _ought_ to do so, whether it be for any
purpose of glory to _her_, or of screening her foibles (for she _does_
commit a few), or of humbly, as a vassal, paying a peppercorn rent to her
august privilege of caprice. Barring these cases, I must adhere to my
resolution of telling no fibs. And I repeat, therefore, but not to be rude,
I repeat in Latin--

Excudent alii meliús spirantia signa,
Credo equidem vivos ducent de marmore vultus:
Altius ascendent: at tu caput, Eva, memento
Sandalo ut infringas referenti oracula tanta.[6]

Yet, sister woman--though I cannot consent to find a Mozart or a Michael
Angelo in your sex, until that day when you claim my promise as to
falsehood--cheerfully, and with the love that burns in depths of
admiration, I acknowledge that you can do one thing as well as the best of
us men--a greater thing than even Mozart is known to have done, or Michael
Angelo--you can die grandly, and as goddesses would die were goddesses
mortal. If any distant world (which _may_ be the case) are so far ahead
of us Tellurians in optical resources as to see distinctly through their
telescopes all that we do on earth, what is the grandest sight to which we
ever treat them? St. Peter's at Rome, do you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or