"Oh," she said, "mother's written two or three books, and lots of magazine articles, about women--women's rights and suffrage, and all that. She's been--well, sort of a leader ever since she graduated from college, back in--just think!--1870, when most girls used to have--accomplishments--'French, music, and washing extra,' you know."
She said it all with a quite adorable seriousness and his gravity matched hers when he replied:
"I would like to meet her very much. Feminism's a subject I'm blankly ignorant about."
"I don't believe," she said thoughtfully, "that I'd call it feminism in talking to mother about it, if I were you. Mother's a suffragist, but"--there came another wave of faint color along with her smile--"but--well, she's awfully respectable, you know."
She didn't seem to mind his laughing out at that, though she didn't join him.
"What about the other interesting member of the family," he asked presently, "your sister? Which is she, a suffragist or a feminist?"
"I suppose," she said, "you'll call Portia a feminist. Anyway, she smokes cigarettes. Oh, can't I get you some? I forgot!"
He had a case of his own in his pocket, he said, and got one out now and lighted it.
"Why," she went on, "Portia hasn't time to talk about it much. You see, she's a business woman. She's a house decorator. I don't mean painting and paper-hanging. She tells you what kind of furniture to buy, and then sells it to you. Portia's terribly clever and awfully independent."
"All right," he said. "That brings us down to you. What are you?"
She sighed. "I'm sort of a black sheep, I guess. I'm just in the university. But I'm to be a lawyer."
Whereupon he cried out "Good lord!" so explosively that she fairly jumped.
Then he apologized, said he didn't know why her announcement should have taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a case--he was a lawyer himself--seemed rather startling.
She sighed. "And now I suppose," she said, "you'll advise me not to be. Portia won't hear of my being a decorator. She says there's nothing in it any more; and my two brothers--one's a professor of history and the other's a high-school principal--say, 'Let her do anything but teach.' One of mother's great friends is a doctor, and she says, 'Anything but medicine,' so I suppose you'll say, 'Anything but law.'"