Part 20 (1/2)
”Certainly, I enjoy it.”
”I'm just breaking down the barriers--so to speak,” he said, with the laughter still lurking in his eyes, as he looked steadily ahead.
”By all means go on,” she said soberly. ”I thought at first you were trying to tease me. I see that you are in earnest.”
”Never more so. This is about the only little path of history I'm at home in--I love to show off in it. I heard a cheerful idiot say the other day that your father meant to carry the civilization of Ma.s.sachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While Ma.s.sachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church members.h.i.+p fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than one thousand dollars were prohibited by law from wearing the garb of a gentleman, gold or silver lace, b.u.t.tons on the knees, or to walk in great boots, or their women to wear silk or scarfs, while the Quakers, Maryland Catholics, Baptists, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were everywhere in the South the heralds of man's equality before the law.”
”But barring our ancestors, I have some things against the men of this generation.”
”Have I, too, sinned and come short?” he asked with mock gravity.
”Our ideals of life are far apart,” she firmly declared.
”What ails my ideal?”
”Your egotism, for one thing. The air with which you calmly select what pleases your fancy. Northern men are bad enough--the insolence of a Southerner is beyond words!”
[Ill.u.s.tration: LILLIAN GISH AS ELSIE, AND THE SENTINEL.]
”You don't say so!” cried Ben, bursting into a hearty laugh. ”Isn't your aunt, Mrs. Farnham, the president of a club?”
”Yes, and she is a very brilliant woman.”
”Enlighten me further.”
”I deny your heaven-born male kings.h.i.+p. The lord of creation is after all a very inferior animal--nearer the brute creation, weaker in infancy, shorter lived, more imperfectly developed, given to fighting, and addicted to idiocy. I never saw a female idiot in my life--did you?”
”Come to think of it, I never did,” acknowledged Ben with comic gravity.
”What else?”
”Isn't that enough?”
”It's nothing. I agree with everything you say, but it is irrelevant. I'm studying law, you know.”
”I have a personality of my own. You and your kind a.s.sume the right to absorb all lesser lights.”
”Certainly, I'm a man.”
”I don't care to be absorbed by a mere man.”
”Don't wish to be protected, sheltered, and cared for?”
”I dream of a life that shall be larger than the four walls of a home. I have never gone into hysterics over the idea of becoming a cook and housekeeper without wages, and snuffing my life out while another grows, expands, and claims the lords.h.i.+p of the world. I can sing. My voice is to me what eloquence is to man. My ideal is an intellectual companion who will inspire and lead me to develop all that I feel within to its highest reach.”
She paused a moment and looked defiantly into Ben's brown eyes, about which a smile was constantly playing. He looked away, and again the river echoed with his contagious laughter. She had to join in spite of herself.
He laughed with boyish gayety. It danced in his eyes, and gave spring to every movement of his slender wiry body. She felt its contagion enfold her.
His laughter melted into a song. In a voice vibrant with joy he sang, ”If you get there before I do, tell 'em I'm comin' too!”