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“You foolish mother!” rallied Miss Evebrook. “To stand upon a platform at woman suffrage meetings and exploit myself is certainly a great recompense to you and father for all the sacrifices you have made in my behalf. But since it pleases you, I do it with pleasure even on the nights when my beau should ‘come a courting.’”

“There is many a one who would like to come, Ethel. You’re the handsomest girl in this Western town—and you know it.”

“Stop that, mother. You know very well I have set my mind upon having ten years’ freedom; ten years in which to love, live, suffer, see the world, and learn about men (not schoolboys) before I choose one.”

“Alice Winthrop is the same age as you are, and looks like a child beside you.”

“Physically, maybe; but her heart and mind are better developed. She has been out in the world all her life, I only a few months.”

“Your lecture last week on ‘The Opposite Sex’ was splendid.”

“Of course. I have studied one hundred books on the subject and attended fifty lectures. All that was necessary was to repeat in an original manner what was not by any means original.”