of her uncertainty long enough, she felt the answer would come; there must be an answer to all this that she suffered, and somehow she felt it lay in Grahamsomehow in Graham she must find it. His very dumbness was to her the corroboration of his blameless guilt. She hated his smiling face; she hated his pretense; she wanted with all her strength to cry out:

"Say what you think! Say what you suspect!"

Then one night, as she sat in his room, and while their lips talked the pleasant commonplaces of happily married people, she realized that the answer to the riddle lay in his desk.

She knew it was there. There, in tangible form was the answer of all her torment and all her suspicion, if she could only look. She waited frozen in her own impatience for the slow moments to drag past on their leaden feet; she sat waiting until Graham should go upstairs and go to sleep beside her, so she could come down and find out what lay there.

There was no fight now. She, Beata Beata with honor like a man's honorwaited with beating heart, her breath coming short, for the evening to pass and for Graham to sleep, that she might commit the one unforgivable crime.

He slept at last. Beata got out of bed, put on her dressing-gown and slippers, and went noiselessly down the stairs. She made no sound; not a stair creaked. It was as though she went through each one of the little acts like some highly trained mechanism, as though all her life had been one rehearsal for this moment. It was as though she had been rehearsing all her life for this-that without noise she might get up, dress herself, go down-stairs without noise and light her candle in the library, then walk swiftly and with the directness of a homing pigeon to Graham's desk to Graham's desk, where the answer of everything lay.

In the strange and painful universe in which Beata had been living the only certainty that she had was that there was the answer, the explanation of the riddle, and that she was about to find it. That she must find it even at the price of her own honor, at the breaking-down

of the things most essential in her nature, meant nothing.

She went unfalteringly to where the desk stood, with the candle in her hand; unfalteringly she pulled out a little drawer and took from it a bundle of letters. They were tied neatly-Graham was exact and methodical in all his ways. As she opened them a little picture fluttered down-a snapshot of herself sent to Graham long ago, and then she recognized in the letters her own handwriting

nothing else. Her letters were what she had come to find her letters written to Graham long ago! to Graham long ago! Written during his brief absences from Alène, telling of Alène's change from day to day; written to him when she was away. Letters for all the world to read; letters without one word of affection beyond that of a kindly friendship.

Her own letters-that was the answer! Her friendship and Graham's-that was the key-note of this mystery! For a second she stood there, not willing to understand. Then came crowding on her memories of Alène's looks and her sudden appearances in the room where she and Graham sat talking innocently-so innocently that no thought of what Alène meant had crossed their minds. So Beata stood motionless, her own letters in her hand, a terrible figure, as though she held there a proof of her own bloodguilt. And the question now arose to her mind:

"When did we first begin to care for each other? And was I here for Alène, or was I here for Graham's sake?"

She had come for Alène, but she had stayed for Graham, and before Alène's tragic death she had been the only comfort that he had had.

own

Then she heard his step behind her, and then his voice, and instead of her name " Alène!" he called. And then with a face of horror and her hands outstretched in a gesture terrible and tragic, a gesture they knew well and that was not her own, she cried:

"Yes-Alène, if you like! Why did you keep these letters-you, who never keep any letters?"

He tried to recover himself.

"Are you mad, Beata?" he said, but the sternness of his voice faltered. "Oh," she took up, "I wish I were

"No," she agreed. "I've not been well-but you've said nothing about it, Graham. It's a very strange illness I've had-what's been its name, Graham? What doctors cure it? You've tried not to believe-what couldn't be believed. Such things can't happen-that's what you've said to yourself when my face has frightened you-when you came into the room and thought Alène was standing here. But how should I have come where I am now, to find my own letters my letters that you kept-my letters that I've been waiting so long to find?"

Listen, Beata—we'll go away. You're ill. We'll go away!"

She held her proof

She saw that he couldn't admit what he had seen. In his man's world such things couldn't be. But it made no difference to her now. in her hand. "We'll go away and forget these weeks," he repeated.

"We'll do what you like it won't alter anything. We know now," Beata answered, dully; for she knew, as Graham did, that there was no flight possible for them, no refuge that they could take anywhere in the world, apart or together. They had heard the voice from the other side of silence; there was no country where they could take refuge, no place to go that would blot out from Graham's memory the picture of Beata leaning over his desk, her letters in her hand.

WOW," said the multiform familiar of the Easy Chair, putting on the air of genial Cynic-" now that the women have got the vote in California, and so have it in six of those hopeful Western States, don't you think it is time they should show that they deserved it?"

We fell in with his mood of cheery banter. "How long," we asked, "have women been without the vote?"

"About as long as men have been with it: say, intermittently in one place or another, about twenty-five hundred years."

"Well, then, we should think that if women showed they deserved it in another twenty-five hundred years it would be about right. We understand some men haven't shown yet that they deserved it." The Cynic laughed. "Well, here and there one. But," he continued seriously, two wrongs don't make a right."

The pun tempted us, and we put in: "The California women have just got the right, all the same. But if you want to know what we really think, we think that women have already shown that they have a right to their full share in political economy by their skill, their immemorial supremacy, in domestic economy."

This, as we intended, made the Cynic sit up. "Oh, come!" he challenged us.

"Government is only housekeeping 'writ large," we went on, "and you will admit that women have always excelled in housekeeping."

"Some," he admitted, with an ironical smile.

They have at least excelled most men in it, and the very qualities which have fitted them to excel in it will fit them to excel in politics: system, detail, assiduity, 'keeping round after' the innumerable things needing to be done from moment to moment. Men have not excelled in government, as the history of the world can prove, because they do not like to govern; but women do like to govern."

VOL. CXXIV.-No. 741.-59

"Any husband will agree to that," the Cynic assented.

We passed his triviality. "Men would rather hunt, or fish, or fight. They would rather fight than govern, and this fact disposes of one anxiety of those who hesitate to let woman say who shall spend her taxes and how, because in the event of war she cannot, or will not, fight. But in the just state of the future, men can and will like to do the fighting as they have done the fighting in the unjust state of the past. Or most of it," we hastened to add. "At all times, when women have given their minds, or their souls, rather, to fighting, they have fought as well as men, from Joan of Arc to the Maid of Saragossa, from Boadicea to Molly Stark. In sieges and leaguers of every kind they have as bravely suffered wounds and famine and death as men have, and will again, if need be. But they do not like fighting, there is no gainsaying that; and they do not excel in it as they do in governing. We have yet to see what they will do as presidents of republics, but they have abundantly shown what they can do in monarchies, not only as powers behind the throne, but as powers on it. England has had no greater rulers than Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria; Russia none greater than the Empress Catherine; Spain none greater than Isabella the Catholic-"

"What is the matter with Semiramis ?" the Cynic interrupted.

"No more than with Nero, or Henry the Eighth, or Peter the Cruel," we responded. "In fact, a very little study of history-say, a very little more than you have perhaps been able to makewill teach you that the reigns of female sovereigns have been the periods of the greatest prosperity and happiness for their peoples."

"Bloody Mary," the Cynic murmured. "Isabella the Second of Spain."

"Isabella, poor thing! had her little foibles, but they were not characteristic

queens. All kings have been personally immoral. As to Bloody Mary, even she was a woman of conscience, but she lived in a time when any difference of opinion in theological matters was treated by the dominant persuasion with very little difference of method. But supposing that Mary was one of the political failures of her sex, it does not prove that women are or will be political failures as a sex. In fact, as our friend Valdés shows in the most delightful of his Papers of Doctor Angelico, woman has a genius for politics-"

"Ah!" the Cynic exulted, “I knew that this wisdom of yours must be secondhand! Well, what does your Spanish novelist have to say that will reconcile men to the folly of California in giving the suffrage to women?"

We had the book at our elbow, and we were very willing to answer from it. "What he has to say he says in the character of the famous poetess Carmen Salazar, whom he has imagined, but perhaps not wholly, for the occasion, and he reports the talk which she brilliantly leads at one of her tertulias in Madrid. Of course you know what a tertulia is?"

"No. Do you?”

"Not exactly. It is something like a'day' with us, but more informal. The friends of the house drop in, almost every evening, and talk as long and late as they like. In Madrid they generally drop in after the theater, at one or two o'clock in the morning, and stay till daybreakso foreigners say. Among the friends of Señora Salazar's house, on the morning or evening in question, is the supposed reporter of the incident, Dr. Jiménez, and the talk begins with her speaking of a volume of Schopenhauer which she has been reading: 'He says that we women are the sex with long hair and short ideas. . . . He cannot forgive Christianity for modifying the happy state of inferiority in which antiquity kept us; he thinks the Oriental races are right, and understand the part that woman should play better than we do with our gallantry and our stupid veneration, the result of the development of GermanoChristian history.'

"Naturally, Jiménez (by the way, he is the Dr. Angelico of the Papers)

declares that Schopenhauer is wrong. He wishes to cite Doña Carmen herself, with her great achievements in poetry, as proof of the pessimistic philosopher's injustice to women; but to his immense surprise she says that she agrees with Schopenhauer in his opinion of their intellectual inferiority. She disclaims the value of what she has herself done. 'I don't deceive myself. I know that I am the first of mediocre writers, but the air I have breathed is far from being atmosphere which inspires great writers. And what I say of myself I say of all, absolutely all, of my sisters, ancient and modern. Don't suppose that I am paradoxical, or in bad humor, or wish to appear singular.''

We broke off our reading here to say, "Of course we are paraphrasing a good deal, and condensing."

"Oh, don't do that!" the Cynic entreated. "I foresee that I shall agree with all that Doña Carmen says, and I want to hear it all."

"It's all very good, but you can't; want of space forbids. She goes on to say, among other things: 'Art has not been, is not, and never will be the patrimony of woman. It is imagined that, sensibility being the quality most developed in woman, she is called to the cultivation of art. That is a profound error denied by the history of the human race.

Where is the feminine Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, or Goethe? Where is the Michelangelo, the Rembrandt, the Titian? . . . How many names of women artists can you cite? What originality has their talent shown? . . . There is hardly any well-educated girl who is not taught music, drawing, painting, even sculpture. Do you think that if there had been born among us a Beethoven or a Rossini, she would have been satisfied to tinkle on the piano or strum the harp? She would have written operas and symphonies. . . . At the bottom of her heart woman is interested little or not at all in nature or art. When she finds herself confronted with a landscape, or a statue, or a painting, she does what she can to be enraptured, but she does not succeed and her admiration rings false. . . . When it comes to practical details, men sew and iron and embroider and scrub and wash