again; always beginning where I left off. I never get any further. I am
weary of them."

"Like an old hen that sits on its eggs month after month and they never
come out?" she said quickly. "I am so pressed in upon by new things that,
lest they should trip one another up, I have to keep forcing them back. My
head swings sometimes. But this one thought stands, never goes--if I might
but be one of these born in the future; then, perhaps, to be born a woman
will not be to be born branded."

Waldo looked at her. It was hard to say whether she were in earnest or
mocking.

"I know it is foolish. Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring
down," she said. "But we are cursed. Waldo, born cursed from the time our
mothers bring us into the world till the shrouds are put on us. Do not
look at me as though I were talking nonsense. Everything has two sides--
the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn."

"I am not laughing," said the boy, sedately enough; "but what curses you?"

He thought she would not reply to him, she waited so long.

"It is not what is done to us, but what is made of us," she said at last,
"that wrongs us. No man can be really injured but by what modifies
himself. We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much
natural force, perhaps, but for the rest--blank; and the world tells us
what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it
says--"Work;" and to us it says--"Seem!" To you it says--As you
approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your