Adam was never called master adam ; we never read of noah esquire , lot knight and baronet , not the right honorable abraham , viscount mesopotamia , baron of carinan ; no , no , they were plain men .
From the pecuniary costs of living as a baronet , to the insults meted out to brilliant females who dared to outdo men at mathematics , she holds up her mirror to an age at once startlingly modern in its hunger for knowledge and almost medieval in its weights of tradition .
