When the ladies rose at dessert, Mrs. Duncombe summoned him: "Come, Rector!-come, Professor! you're not to sit over your wine."
"We rise so far above the ordinary level of manhood!" said Julius, obediently rising.
"Once for all, Mr. Charnock," said Mrs. Duncombe, turning on him with flashing eyes and her Elizabethan majesty, "if you come prepared to scoff, we can have nothing to do with you."
Rosamond's eyes looked mischievous, and her brow cocked, but Julius answered in earnest, "Really, I assure you I have not come in a spirit of sarcasm; I am honestly desirous of hearing your arguments."
"Shall I stay in your stead?" added Miss Moy. "They'll be much more amusing here!"
"Come, Gussie, you're on your good behaviour," said Mrs. Duncombe. "Bob kept you to learn the right way of making a sensation."
As they entered the drawing-room two more guests arrived, namely, Joanna Bowater, and Herbert, who walked in with a kind of grim submission, till he saw Lady Tyrrell, when he lighted up, and, on a little gracious gesture with her hand, he sat down on the sofa beside her; and was there solaced by an occasional remark in an undertone; for indeed the boy was always in a trance wherever she was, and she had a fair amount of by-play wherewith to entertain herself and him during the discussion.
"You are just in time, Jenny," said Rosamond; "the great question is going to be started."
"And it is-?"
"The Equality of the Sexes," pronounced Mrs. Duncombe.
"Ex cathedra?" said Julius, as the graceful Muse seated herself in a large red arm-chair. "This scene is not an easy one in which to dispute it."
"You see, Bessie," said Mrs. Tallboys, "that men are so much afraid of the discussion that they try to elude it with empty compliment under which is couched a covert sneer."
"Perhaps," returned Julius, "we might complain that we can't open our lips without compliments and sneers being detected when we were innocent of both."
"Were you?" demanded Mrs. Tallboys.
"Honestly, I was looking round and thinking the specimens before us would tell in your favour."
"What a gallant parson!" cried Miss Moy.
But a perfect clamour broke out from others.
"Julius, that's too bad! when you know-"
"Mr Charnock, you are quite mistaken. Bob is much cleverer than I, in his own line-"
"Quite true, Rector," affirmed Herbert; "Joan has more brains than all the rest of us-for a woman, I mean."
"For a woman!" repeated Mrs. Tallboys. "Let a human being do or be what she will, it is disposed of in a moment by that one verdict, 'Very well for a woman!'"
"How is it with the decision of posterity?" said Jenny. "Can you show any work of woman of equal honour and permanence with that of men?"
"Because her training has been sedulously inferior."
"Not always," said Jenny; "not in Italy in the cinque cento, nor in England under Elizabeth."
"Yes, and there were names-!"
"Names, yes, but that is all. The lady's name is remembered for the curiosity of her having equalled the ordinary poet or artist of her time, but her performances either are lost or only known to curious scholars. They have not the quality which makes things permanent."
"What do you say to Sappho?"
"There is nothing of her but a name, and fragments that curious scholars read."
"Worse luck to her if she invented Sapphics," added Herbert.
"One of womankind's torments for mankind, eh?" said his neighbour.
"And there are plenty more such," asserted Mrs. Duncombe, boldly (for these were asides). "It is only that one can't recollect-and the men have suppressed them."
"I think men praised them," said Jenny, "and that we remember the praise, not the works. For instance, Roswitha, or Olympia Morata, or Vittoria Colonna. Vittoria's sonnets are extant, but we only value them as being hers, more for what she was than for their intrinsic merit."
"And," added Eleonora, "men did not suppress Hannah More, or Joanna Baillie. You know Scott thought Miss Baillie's dramas would rank with Shakespeare's."
Mrs. Tallboys was better read in logic and mathematics than in history, and did not follow Jenny, but she turned her adversary's argument to her own advantage, by exclaiming, "Are the gentlemen present familiar with these bright lights?"
"I confess my ignorance of some of them," said Julius.
"But my youngest brother knows all that," said Rosamond at a brave venture.
"Macaulay's school-boy," murmured Lady Tyrrell, softly.
"Let us return to the main point," said Mrs. Tallboys, a little annoyed. "It is of the present and future that I would speak, not of the past."
"Does not the past give the only data on which to form a conclusion?" said Julius.
"Certainly not. The proposition is not what a woman or two in her down-trodden state may have exceptionally effected, but her natural equality, and in fact superiority, in all but the physical strength which has imposed an unjust bondage on the higher nature."
"I hardly know where to meet you if you reject all arguments from proved facts," said Julius.
"And the Bible. Why don't you say the Bible?" exclaimed his wife in an undertone; but Mrs. Tallboys took it up and said, "The precepts of Scripture are founded on a state of society passed away. You may find arguments for slavery there."
"I doubt that," said Julius. "There are practical directions for an existing state of things, which have been distorted into sanction for its continuance. The actual precepts are broad principles, which are for all times, and apply to the hired servant as well as to the slave. So again with the relations of man and wife; I can nowhere find a command so adapted to the seclusion and depression of the Eastern woman as to be inapplicable to the Christian matron. And the typical virtuous woman, the valiant woman, is one of the noblest figures anywhere depicted."
"I know," said Mrs. Tallboys, who had evidently been waiting impatiently again to declaim, "that men, even ministers of religion, from Paul if you like downwards, have been willing enough to exalt woman so long as they claim to sit above her. The higher the oppressed, so much higher the self-exaltation of the oppressor. Paul and Peter exalt their virtuous woman, but only as their own appendage, adorning themselves; and while society with religious ministers at the head of it call on woman to submit, and degrade the sex, we shall continue to hear of such disgraces to England as I see in your police reports-brutal mechanics beating their wives."
"I fear while physical force is on the side of the brute," said Julius, "no abstract recognition of equality would save her."
"Society would take up her cause, and protect her."
"So it is willing to do now, if she asks for protection."
"Yes," broke in Rosamond, "but nothing would induce a woman worth sixpence to take the law against her husband."
"There I think Lady Rosamond has at once demonstrated the higher nature of the woman," said Mrs. Tallboys. "What man would be capable of such generosity?"
"No one denies," said Julius, "that generous forbearance, patience, fortitude, and self-renunciation, belong almost naturally to the true wife and mother, and are her great glory; but would she not be stripped of them by self-assertion as the peer in power?"
"Turning our flank again with a compliment," said Mrs. Duncombe. "These fine qualities are very convenient to yourselves, and so you praise them up."
"Not so!" returned Julius, "because they are really the higher virtues!"
"Patience!" at once exclaimed the American and English emancipators with some scorn.
"Yes," said Julius, in a low tone of thorough earnest. "The patience of strength and love is the culmination of virtue."
Jenny knew what was in his mind, but Mrs. Tallboys, with a curious tone, half pique, half triumph, said, "You acknowledge this which you call the higher nature in woman-that is to say, all the passive qualities,-and you are willing to allow her a finer spiritual essence, and yet you do not agree to her equal rights. This is the injustice of the prejudice which has depressed her all these centuries."