to say about a woman who threw herself overboard for the pleasure of being rescued by a bluejacket?” she said. “We had a word for them. Ah! I have it.⁠ ⁠…” (But we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in the extreme and passing strange on a lady’s lips.) “Lord! Lord!” she cried again at the conclusion of her thoughts, “must I then begin to respect the opinion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can’t swim, if I have to be rescued by a bluejacket, by God!” she cried, “I must!” Upon which a gloom fell over her. Candid by nature, and averse to all kinds of equivocation, to tell lies bored her. It seemed to her a roundabout way of going to work. Yet, she reflected, the flowered paduasoy⁠—the pleasure of being rescued by a bluejacket⁠—if these were only to be obtained by roundabout ways, roundabout one must go, she supposed. She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. “Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,” she reflected; “for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature.

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