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 tunity to observe their brains, and, in some respects, I am tremendously impressed by them."

"Oh, we have some common-sense among us," she agreed.

"It isn't common-sense so much," I corrected, "in which girls excel. It is a special faculty of their sex, a kind of darting velocity of mind, which men of other races, the Jews and the Chinese, for example, display more abundantly than Anglo-Saxon men. In manual deftness, in celerity of apprehension, in executive readiness, in a kind of swift practical insight, in flying straight to the point, girls and young women are proving dangerous competitors. They remind me of turtle doves, which, you know, have two very different notes. They coo and coo in the woods, till you think that a mournful amorousness is all they are good for; but if you start them up, they go 'piet, piet, piet' at ninety miles an hour to their next destination."

"Oliver is quicker than I am," said Cornelia, whose generalizations on the virtues rest largely on observation of her own family, "but Dorothy is quicker than her brother; and I am quicker than you are. Yes, I think you are right. Girls are quicker. But quickness isn't very important in