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 shown any real reason why I should. Some people might think that I had been treated badly by them—but the way I feel towards them is deeper than experience.'

'I know what it is,' blazed Pauline, 'at heart you are a slave-woman—you are the true product of generations of women whom men ruled with a whip! You bow before the tyrant, you kiss the hand that strikes you—yes, and the mouth that tells you you are only a live doll—a plaything for the lords of creation!' Pauline's color rose—either from her anger or at the erotic suggestion of kissing a tyrant's mouth. 'But, Miss, please remember that before the human male so came into ascendancy there was a time when women ruled the world. And when you get down among the spiders and the octopuses the male is hardly visible—and by the time you have reached—I think it is the...jellyfish, he is—extinct.'

'How pathetic!' said Lanice—who had not entered very deeply into the spirit of the game.

'But there are women—noble, high-minded women—who, I am sure, are descended, not from the slave-women of history, but from the great free female rulers of an earlier date....So in a few years you will be quite ready to let them put a weeping willow and an urn at your head and write your epitaph.'

'Yes, something like this—

'Humph, they will hardly call you a girl at seventy