and I hold that first class responsible for the existence of those
people who clamour for change of any kind, regardless of the
consequences. Their ideas, shorn of all good intention, have resulted
in the production of a new creature; and have made it possible for
women who have the faults of both sexes and the virtues of neither to
mix in society. The bad work done by the influence of this second class
is only too apparent. It is to them we owe the fact that there is less
refinement, less courtesy, less of the really good breeding which shows
itself in kindness and consideration for others, and, Heaven help us!
even less modesty among us now than there was some years ago."

"These are the women, too, who spend their time and talents on the
production of cleverly written books of the most corrupt tendency.
Their works are a special feature of the age, and are doubly dangerous
because they have the art of making the worst ideas attractive, by
presenting them in forms too refined and beautiful to shock even the
most delicate."

"Besides these two classes there is the third, which is more difficult
to define. It is the one on which our hope rests. The women who belong
to it are dissatisfied like the others, but they are less decided, and
therefore their dissatisfaction takes no positive shape. They also want
something, and go this way and that as if in search of it, but they are
not really trying for anything in particular. They do good and evil
indiscriminately, and for the same motive: they find distraction in
doing something--anything. But the desire to do good is latent in all
of them; show them the way, and it will make itself apparent."

"But what is the reason of all this dissatisfaction?" I asked. "Why
don't you go to your husbands and brothers to be set right, as of old?"