Have you ever heard a group of women talking reasonably together? "

"Yes--we do!" Irais and I cried in a breath.

"It has interested me," went on the Man of Wrath, "in my idle moments,
to listen to their talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little
stories they told of their best friends who were absent, to note
the spiteful little digs they gave their best friends who were present,
to watch the utter incredulity with which they listened to the tale
of some other woman's conquests, the radiant good faith they displayed
in connection with their own, the instant collapse into boredom,
if some topic of so-called general interest, by some extraordinary chance,
were introduced."
"You must have belonged to a particularly nice set," remarked Irais.

"And as for politics," he said, "I have never heard them
mentioned among women."

"Children and idiots are not interested in such things," I said.

"And we are much too frightened of being put in prison," said Irais.

"In prison?" echoed Minora.

"Don't you know," said Irais, turning to her "that if you talk
about such things here you run a great risk of being imprisoned?"

"But why?"

"But why? Because, though you yourself may have meant