"I don't see that a woman has any business to be a genius," she remarked.

"And I can't help being prejudiced against women writers, your father always was.

It's as if they really pretended to know as much as a man.

When they publish books I suppose they expect men to read them and that in itself is a kind of conceit." Trent yielded the point as he helped himself to the cakes brought in by an old negro servant.
"Well, I shan't ask Miss Wilde to call on you," he laughed, "so you won't be apt to run across the learned of your sex." "Oh, I shouldn't mind myself," responded the old lady, with amiability, "but I do hate to have you thrown with women that you wouldn't meet at home." "I certainly shouldn't meet Miss Wilde at home if that is what you mean." "It's bad enough to live in a partitioned cage like this," resumed Mrs.
Trent, in her soft, expressionless voice, "and to dry your clothes on your neighbour's roofs, but I can bear anything so long as we are not forced to associate with common people.

Of course I don't expect to find the manners of Virginia up here," she added as a last concession, "but I may as well confess that the people I've come across don't seem to me to be exactly civil." "Just as we don't seem to them to be particularly worldly-wise, I dare say." She nodded her head, almost without hearing him, while her even tones rippled on over her quaint ideas, which shone to her son's mind like little silver pebbles beneath the shallow stream.
"I'm almost reconciled to the fact that old ladies wear colours and flowers in their bonnets," she pursued, "to say nothing of low-neck dresses, but it does seem to me that they might show a little ordinary politeness.