"Yes, Evelina, I think you will have to insist forcibly on assuming
charge of your own social and financial affairs in your own home. It may
not be easy, with such a man as you describe, but you will accomplish
it. However, many mediocre women have proved their ability to attend to
their own fortunes, and do good business for themselves; but your battle
is to be fought on still higher grounds. You are to rise and establish
with your fellow-man a plane of common citizenship. You do it for his
sake and your own, and for that of humanity."

"Suppose, after I get up there on that plateau, I didn't find any man at
all," I ventured faint-heartedly, but with a ripple of my risibles; the
last in life I fear.

"You must reach down your hands to them and draw them up to you," she
answered in a tone of tonic inspiration. "You are to claim the same
right to express your emotions that a man has. You are to offer your
friendship to both men and women on the same frank terms, with no
degrading hesitancy caused by an embarrassment on account of your sex.
It is his due and yours. No form of affection is to be withheld from
him. It is to be done frankly and impressively, and when the time
comes--" I can hardly write this, but the memory of the wonderful though
fanatic light in Jane's eyes makes me able to scrawl it--"that you feel
the mating instinct in you move towards any man, I charge you that you
are to consider it a sacred obligation to express it with the same
honesty that a man would express the same thing to you, in like case,
even if he has shown no sign of that impulse toward you. No contortions
and contemptible indirect method of attack, but a fearless one that is
yours by right, and his though he may not acknowledge it. The barbaric
and senseless old convention that denies women the right of selection,