"Bravo, wife !" I cried in true delight. "I do indeed understand you now.
You have said it better than I could ever have done. That's the plague of
you women! You have been taught for centuries and centuries that there is
little or nothing to be expected of you, and so you won't try. Therefore we
men know no more than you do whether it is in you or not. And when you do
try, instead of trying to think, you want to be in Parliament all at once."

"Do you apply that remark to me, sir?" demanded Ethelwyn.

"You must submit to bear the sins of your kind upon occasion," I answered.

"I am content to do that, so long as yours will help mine," she replied.

"Then I may go on?" I said, with interrogation.

"Till sunrise if you like. We were talking of the cubicalness--I believe
you called it--of nature."

"And you capped it with the cubicalness of thought. And quite right
too. There are people, as a dear friend of mine used to say, who are so
accustomed to regard everything in the _flat_, as dogma cut and--not
_always_ dried my moral olfactories aver--that if you prove to them the
very thing they believe, but after another mode than that they have been
accustomed to, they are offended, and count you a heretic. There is no help
for it. Even St. Paul's chief opposition came from the Judaizing Christians
of his time, who did not believe that God _could_ love the Gentiles, and
therefore regarded him as a teacher of falsehood. We must not be fierce
with them. Who knows what wickedness of their ancestors goes to account for
their stupidity? For that there are stupid people, and that they are, in