1
Diane and Her Friends
By Arthur Sherburne Hardy
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1914
-----
I
THE DEFENSE OF DIANE
I am a soldier's wife and a soldier's daughter. It is necessary you should know this in order to answer the question which I shall propose to you. Perhaps I ought also to say at the outset that I am a Frenchwoman. But that will soon be evident.
I do not think I am at all what is called "a new woman." Certainly I love to do what I please, which has always been the prerogative of all women. And I approve of many things which other women appear to wish to do, without in the least wishing to do them myself. If a woman wishes to be a lawyer, that is her affair. I recognize obvious reasons why she should wish to "exercise the suffrage," as they say in the Chamber. But I see reasons quite as obvious why I should not claim that privilege myself. I have a very sweet bone in my mouth which I prefer to any other. It is quite enough to work out my own salvation, and if I love to have my own way, it is not through pure selfishness, for I admit that I should never have discovered how absurd a way mine often was if I had not insisted upon having it. All this logical tournament about our rights bores me. When I was a little girl my tutor once wished to compel me to prove that an equation of the first degree had but one root. It was so ridiculously evident, how could any one be expected to prove it? I went to my father in a passion of tears, and he quite approved of me. "Why torment the child with proving what is evident to her?" he said.