English women. She seemed to take a fancy to me, and we soon grew very
good friends.

She is the first advocate I have met, except yourself, of that doctrine
upon the rights of Women, of which one reads more in the journals than
one hears discussed in salons. Naturally enough I felt great interest in
that subject, more especially since my rambles in the Bois were
forbidden; and as long as she declaimed on the hard fate of the women
who, feeling within them powers that struggle for air and light beyond
the close precinct of household duties, find themselves restricted from
fair rivalry with men in such fields of knowledge and toil and glory as
men since the world began have appropriated to themselves, I need not say
that I went with her cordially: you can guess that by my former letters.
But when she entered into the detailed catalogue of our exact wrongs and
our exact rights, I felt all the pusillanimity of my sex and shrank back
in terror.

Her husband, joining us when she was in full tide of eloquence, smiled at
me with a kind of saturnine mirth. "Mademoiselle, don't believe a word
she says: it is only tall talk! In America the women are absolute
tyrants, and it is I who, in concert with my oppressed countrymen, am
going in for a platform agitation to restore the Rights of Men."

Upon this there was a lively battle of words between the spouses, in
which, I must own, I thought the lady was decidedly worsted.

No, Eulalie, I see nothing in these schemes for altering our relations
towards the other sex which would improve our condition. The
inequalities we suffer are not imposed by law,--not even by convention:
they are imposed by nature.