Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/258

 would be tempting Providence. ‘The change of weather alone is a great danger on the high range. The local guides are well accustomed to observe it, and no one who values his life should venture on those heights without one.’

‘No, by the cross of Christopher Columbus!’ put in her husband. ‘Why, I needed a guide inside a London ’bus yesterday, although Rose was with me. We were sitting near the door in one of the red pennies which run between ‘Woyl Oak’ and the Strand, you know. I took a fellaw opposite me for one of the fellaws of my club, and shook hands with him violently. He was a perfect stranger, and stone-deaf into the bargain. Didn’t he stare like an owl, and didn’t our co-’bussers giggle!’

While the rest of the company were still chatting in the drawing-room, Friga led her intimate friend out again into the garden, and, taking her hand, said,—

‘Lesbie, something has been haunting me ever since the news of the disaster of Queenstown, about which, I will confess to you, I care very little politically. That something is the interview which you and your uncle had some time ago with Cardinal Power, and which you gave me an account of. I understand your view, Lesbie, to be, that if women’s rights are to be vindicated, the religious department must not be neglected; because it is mainly by appeals to the superstitious credulity and ignorance of the masses that our subjection has been maintained. You hold, do you not, that it is essential to the regeneration of society and a higher civilisation, that the spiritual dominion should pass out of the hands of those who have usurped it, and that the priestess of nature should also become the priestess by society’s ordinances; and further, that the divine supremacy itself should be ascribed to our sex. Is that your doctrine?’

‘Certainly, Fri; what of it?’