Page:The wheels of chance -- a bicycling idyll.djvu/320

306 said "Hush!" and the ringing tenor of the clergyman rode triumphantly over the meeting. "I cannot understand this spirit of unrest that has seized upon the more intelligent portion of the feminine community. You had a pleasant home, a most refined and intelligent lady in the position of your mother, to cherish and protect you—"

"If I had a mother," gulped Jessie, succumbing to the obvious snare of self-pity, and sobbing.

"To cherish, protect, and advise you. And you must needs go out of it all alone into a strange world of unknown dangers—"

"I wanted to learn," said Jessie.

"You wanted to learn. May you never have anything to unlearn."

"Ah!" from Mrs. Milton, very sadly.

"It isn't fair for all of you to argue at me at once," submitted Jessie, irrelevantly.

"A world full of unknown dangers," resumed the clergyman. "Your proper place was surely the natural surroundings that are part of you. You have been unduly influenced, it is only too apparent, by a class of literature which, with all due respect to a distinguished authoress that shall be nameless, I must call the New Woman Literature. In that deleterious ingredient of our book boxes—" "I don't altogether agree with you there," said