Page:Nalkowska - Kobiety (Women).djvu/73

Rh but whether all learned men, are capable of accurate logical reasoning."

"Oh, of course, exceptions are everywhere to be found," he answers gravely, with his own peculiar directness of mental association.

To his mind, I am among women one of those exceptions. He is never scandalized at my late visits; perhaps only for the reason that my visits are made to him. He is withal full of respect for my intellectual capacity, which he thinks due to him. For him, I am the one woman who can talk reasonably.

For my own part, I do not consider myself to be clever merely for being able to draw a logical conclusion from two premises. What I call cleverness is the faculty of understanding all things, and of wondering at none; that of setting aside all preconceived ideas and doctrines, by reason of which men have set up "categories," and of giving up accepted forms of thinking, that seem to be, but are not, necessary to thought; the faculty of getting out of oneself, and viewing both oneself and everything else from without and objectively.

I sit down in one of the high-backed armchairs, and begin to talk about some abstruse subject or other, but making every endeavour