"Women should understand men's affairs, perhaps," said Miss Garvice, "but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power of influencing they can exercise now.""There IS something sound in that position," said Capes, intervening as if to defend Miss Garvice against a possible attack from Ann Veronica. "It may not be just and so forth, but, after all, it is how things are. Women are not in the world in the same sense that men are--fighting individuals in a scramble.
I don't see how they can be. Every home is a little recess, a niche, out of the world of business and competition, in which women and the future shelter.""A little pit!" said Ann Veronica; "a little prison!""It's just as often a little refuge. Anyhow, that is how things are.""And the man stands as the master at the mouth of the den.""As sentinel. You forget all the mass of training and tradition and instinct that go to make him a tolerable master. Nature is a mother; her sympathies have always been feminist, and she has tempered the man to the shorn woman.""I wish," said Ann Veronica, with sudden anger, "that you could know what it is to live in a pit!"She stood up as she spoke, and put down her cup beside Miss Garvice's. She addressed Capes as though she spoke to him alone.
"I can't endure it," she said.
Every one turned to her in astonishment.
She felt she had to go on. "No man can realize," she said, "what that pit can be. The way--the way we are led on! We are taught to believe we are free in the world, to think we are queens. . .
. Then we find out. We find out no man will treat a woman fairly as man to man--no man. He wants you--or he doesn't; and then he helps some other woman against you. . . . What you say is probably all true and necessary. . . . But think of the disillusionment! Except for our sex we have minds like men, desires like men. We come out into the world, some of us--"She paused. Her words, as she said them, seemed to her to mean nothing, and there was so much that struggled for expression.
"Women are mocked," she said. "Whenever they try to take hold of life a man intervenes."She felt, with a sudden horror, that she might weep. She wished she had not stood up. She wondered wildly why she had stood up.
No one spoke, and she was impelled to flounder on. "Think of the mockery!" she said. "Think how dumb we find ourselves and stifled! I know we seem to have a sort of freedom. . . . Have you ever tried to run and jump in petticoats, Mr. Capes? Well, think what it must be to live in them--soul and mind and body!
It's fun for a man to jest at our position.""I wasn't jesting," said Capes, abruptly.
She stood face to face with him, and his voice cut across her speech and made her stop abruptly. She was sore and overstrung, and it was intolerable to her that he should stand within three yards of her unsuspectingly, with an incalculably vast power over her happiness. She was sore with the perplexities of her preposterous position. She was sick of herself, of her life, of everything but him; and for him all her masked and hidden being was crying out.
She stopped abruptly at the sound of his voice, and lost the thread of what she was saying. In the pause she realized the attention of the others converged upon her, and that the tears were brimming over her eyes. She felt a storm of emotion surging up within her. She became aware of the Scotch student regarding her with stupendous amazement, a tea-cup poised in one hairy hand and his faceted glasses showing a various enlargement of segments of his eye.
The door into the passage offered itself with an irresistible invitation--the one alternative to a public, inexplicable passion of weeping.
Capes flashed to an understanding of her intention, sprang to his feet, and opened the door for her retreat.
Part 8
"Why should I ever come back?" she said to herself, as she went down the staircase.
She went to the post-office and drew out and sent off her money to Ramage. And then she came out into the street, sure only of one thing--that she could not return directly to her lodgings.
