"I'm content. But probably I'm old-fashioned. There is quite another
spirit now. Girls out of pinafores must begin seriously to consider some
calling. All their flirtation from seventeen to twenty-one is with some
occupation. All their dancing days they must go to college, or in some
way lay the foundation for a useful life. I suppose it's all right. No
doubt we shall have a much higher style of women in the future than we
ever had in the past."

"You allow nothing," said Mrs. Fletcher, "for the necessity of earning a
living in these days of competition. Women never will come to their
proper position in the world, even as companions of men, which you regard
as their highest office, until they have the ability to be
self-supporting."

"Oh, I admitted the fact of the independence of women a long time ago.
Every one does that before he comes to middle life. About the shifting
all round of this burden of earning a living, I am not so sure. It does
not appear yet to make competition any less; perhaps competition would
disappear if everybody did earn his own living and no more. I wonder,
by-the-way, if the girls, the young women, of the class we seem to be
discussing ever do earn as much as would pay the wages of the servants
who are hired to do the housework in their places?"

"That is a most ignoble suggestion," I could not help saying, "when you
know that the object in modern life is the cultivation of the mind, the
elevation of women, and men also, in intellectual life."

"I suppose so. I should like to have asked Abigail Adams's opinion on the
way to do it."