There was a thing she said about men once (in the boarding house now)
and often repeated. “They’re very fond of saying women are cats,” she
once said. “Fools! It’s men that are the cat tribe: tame cats, tabby
cats, wild cats, Cheshire cats, tomcats and stray cats! Aren’t they
just? And look at them--tame cats are miserable creatures, tabby cats
the sloppy creatures, wild cats ferocious creatures, Cheshire cats fool
creatures, tomcats disgusting creatures, stray cats--on the whole the
stray cats are the least objectionable, they are bearable: at the right
time and for a short time.”
This characterisation of men as Rosalie, in sequent development of her
attitude towards men, had come to regard them was delivered to the girl
with whom (for cheapness) her room in the boarding house was shared.
Rosalie went from Aunt Belle’s to this boarding house to assert and to
achieve her greater independence. A man, Rosalie debated, would have
gone into bachelor rooms; but young women did not go into bachelor rooms
in those days and the singularity of Rosalie’s attitude towards life
is rather well presented in the fact that she never set herself against
conventions inhibitory of her sex merely because they were inhibitory
of her sex. When the years brought those violent scenes and emotions of
what has been called the suffragette campaign, Rosalie, who might have
been expected to be a militant of the militants, took no part nor even
interest in it whatever. She did not desire the privileges of men merely
because they were the privileges of men; she desired a status which
happened to be in the right of men and she went towards it without
seeking to change the established order of things, just as, from one
field desiring a flower in another field, she would have gone to fetch
it without changing her dress.
A man, anxious for full independence, would have gone into bachelor
rooms; but young women did not go into bachelor rooms. They achieved
their independence perfectly well, and far more cheaply, by going into
a boarding house. She therefore, very excitedly, went into a boarding
house.
There was no difficulty about leaving Aunt Belle’s. Once Rosalie was
established in business with Mr. Simcox, tied to business hours, and
earning a weekly salary, she no longer occupied in Aunt Belle’s house
the position of dependence which was in Aunt Belle’s house the first,
and indeed the only, qualification for all who occupied her house. Aunt
Belle’s guests had to be guests: wealthy guests who could be entertained
from early morning tea (beautifully served) to bedtime and made
graciously to admire; or if poor guests, and particularly poor
relations, guests who could be even more impressed and were naturally
much more enthusiastically delighted and profoundly admiring. Rosalie,
in business, could not be entertained and did not sufficiently admire.
She had to have a special early breakfast; she disappeared; she was not
in to lunch or tea; she was not sufficiently impressed by what cook had
prepared but had rather too much to say about what she had been doing,
at dinner; and she excused herself away to early bed on the ground of
fatigue or of having certain books to study. Rosalie, in business, was
not a guest at all in Aunt Belle’s sense of the word: indeed there came
an occasion--Rosalie twice in one week late for dinner--when Aunt Belle
said awfully, “My house is not a hotel, Rosalie. I cannot have my nice
house turned into a hotel.”
It was the nearest thing to an unkind word ever spoken by Aunt Belle to
Rosalie, and it was so near that it brought Aunt Belle up to Rosalie’s
bed that night--solicitude in a terrific dressing gown of crimson
silk--to express the hope that Rosalie was not crying (she was not; she
had been sound asleep) at anything Aunt Belle “might have said.” “But
you see, dear child, there are the servants to consider, all that
delicious soup and all that most tasty turbot au gratin to be kept warm
for you, and there is your kind Uncle Pyke to consider; men do not like
their meals to be...”
The boarding house, which Rosalie, with qualms as to its reception by
Aunt Belle, had for some time been secretly meditating, came easily
after that. The boarding house had moreover for Aunt Belle a double
attraction. It not only removed Rosalie in her capacity of one
threatening to turn Aunt Belle’s nice house into a hotel; it also
restored Rosalie in her capacity of overwhelmed, grateful and admiring
poor relation. Rosalie was now invited from the boarding house just as
previously she had been invited from the Sultana’s; the table and
the appointments of Aunt Belle’s house were now lavishly displayed in
contrast to the display and the table endured by Rosalie at the boarding
house; Aunt Belle was again supremely happy in Rosalie and abundantly
kind; dinner each Saturday night was a standing invitation and
frequently for these dinners Aunt Belle arranged “a little dinner party
for you, dear child, just one or two really nice people that it is nice
for you to meet and that you can tell your friends at the boarding house
about, dear child.”
Aunt Belle helped Rosalie to choose the boarding house and saw that it
was “nice.” Nice people went there and the proprietress, Miss Kentish,
was nice. Miss Kentish had a grey, detachable fringe which became, and
re-mained, semi-detached immediately after breakfast, and a mobile front
tooth which came out surprisingly far when she talked and went in with
a sharp click when she stopped. She had for newcomers a single
conversational sentence--“My name is Kentish, though funnily enough we
come from Sussex”--and, for all purposes, a single business principle,
that of willingness “to come to an arrangement.” “I am afraid I cannot
remedy your water not being hot at eight o’clock,” she would say to a
boarder, “but I will gladly come to an arrangement with you. Ten minutes
to eight or ten minutes past eight” (click). She would come to an
arrangement on anything. She became very fond of Rosalie in course of
time and once told her that though her duties never permitted her to
attend church she had “come to an arrangement” with the vicar and felt
that she had “come to an arrangement with Our Lord” (click). She came to
an arrangement with Rosalie in the matter of tariff, receiving her and a
Miss Salmon, who also sought arrangement, as “two friends as one.” This
was two persons sharing a room at the tariff of a person and a half.
Living was very cheap in those days. Rosalie, at the beginning, with
Miss Salmon, paid 18/6 a week, and out of the twenty-five shillings paid
her, at first, every Friday by Mr. Simcox there remained what seemed to
Rosalie great wealth.
She set herself to save on it and her first purpose in thus saving was
to accumulate money on which she could draw so as to be able to pay
for a room private to herself. That would have taken some time. Her
successive increases in her earnings, as Mr. Simcox’s hobby developed
into a business, brought privacy, and in time what amounted to luxury,
by much swifter process. Rosalie was a very long time at the boarding
house. From being two friends as one she passed to a small remote
room of her own, then to a larger and more accessible room, then to a
bed-sitting-room, finally to a very delightful arrangement. There was on
the second floor a fine roomy apartment having a dressing-room opening
out of it. Rosalie, by then in much favour with Miss Kentish, not only
secured the suite but “came to an arrangement” with Miss Kentish by
which the furniture and fittings were removed from the rooms and Rosalie
permitted to fit, decorate and furnish them herself. Rosalie never knew
happier hours than in the furnishing of those two rooms into a little
kingdom of her own: she never in all her life knew days as happy as the
days there spent.
But at the beginning, two friends as one with Miss Salmon and first
contact with life from the angle presented by some twenty various
individuals met at meals and in the public rooms. Miss Salmon was a
pale, fussy creature with pince-nez in some mysterious way set so far
from her eyes that she always appeared to be running after them as if to
keep them balanced. Whenever anything of which she did not approve was
being said to Miss Salmon or was being done before Miss Salmon, she
maintained throughout it, moving about in pursuit of her pince-nez, a
rather loud, constant, tuneless humming. When her moment came she
would always begin “Well, now” and then swallow forcibly as though the
swallowing gave her pain. “Well, now” (gulp). This introduction was
always precedent to speech by Miss Salmon, whether after humming or not.
Rosalie frequently went to Sunday church service with her and there
was an occasion in the Litany on which Miss Salmon, who either had been
wandering or sleeping, suddenly came to herself at the correct moment
and said: “Well, now”--(gulp)--“We beseech thee to hear us, O Lord.”
Miss Salmon was employed as a daily nursery governess by a family
resident across the park who, not hav-ing room for her, had “come to
an arrangement” with Miss Kentish for her accommodation at the boarding
house; and with her fussiness, her nose pursuit, her humming and her
general ineptitude of habit and of thought, she was as it were a fated
companion for Rosalie; and it was the case that all the other inmates of
the boarding house were, in regard to Rosalie, equally and in the same
sense fated. Miss Salmon and they were fated, or fatal, to Rosalie, in
the sense that it would have been well then for Rosalie, as always well
for any developing young thing, to have been among companions who drew
upon her sympathies and called for her consideration. The contrary was
here presented to her. She was ripe to be intolerant for she was very
full of purpose and purpose is a motive power of much impatience. Miss
Salmon, who would have made a saint impatient, made Rosalie, who was not
a saint, very impatient and the virus of this impatience was that very
soon Rosalie made no attempt to conceal it. It seemed to Rosalie that
whenever she projected any plan to Miss Salmon--as to “do” a pit at a
theatre--or any theory--as that men and not women were manifestly the
cat tribe--it seemed to her that Miss Salmon always hummed with
the maddening humming denotive of disapproval, and always prefaced
stupendously stubborn idiocy with the “Well, now” and the gulp that
alone were sufficient to drive enthusiasm crazy.
“Mmmmm--mm. Mmm--mmmm--mm--mm,” would go Miss Salmon, following her
pince-nez up and down the little bedroom. And then, the pince-nez
poised, “Well, now” (gulp).
And Rosalie came to cry, “Oh, never mind. Never mind, for goodness’
sake. I know exactly what you’re going to say so what is the good of
saying it?” Miss Salmon nevertheless would say it, in full measure,
pressed down at intervals in solid lumps with reiterated “Well, now”
(gulp). And then Rosalie would hum to show she was not listening and
thus in time to the position that Rosalie, beyond the ordinary changes
of everyday conversation, took not the slightest notice of Miss Salmon
but busied herself in their room, or came into it or went out of it,
precisely as if Miss Salmon, who with her gulps, her fussiness and
her balancing was very much there, was in fact not there at all. When
Rosalie for the weekly dinner at Aunt Belle’s used to dress in the
evening frock of Laetitia’s given her for the purpose by Aunt Belle, she
used, at first, to say to Miss Salmon, “There, how do I look, Gertrude?
Can you see that mend in the lace?”
“Well, now--” (gulp).
Very soon she was dressing (at the common dressing table) with no more
regard for Miss Salmon or for the continuous humming of Miss Salmon
(signification of Miss Salmon’s disapproval of the monopolisation of the
dressing table) than if Miss Salmon had been an automaton wound up to
balance a pince-nez around the room, to hum, and at intervals to gulp.
This was a small thing, but it was an important small thing. Rosalie was
entirely insensible to the opinions and the existence of Miss Salmon,
and it followed that she became entirely insensible to the feelings of
Miss Salmon. To begin by ignoring a person with whom you are in daily
contact is certainly to end by not caring at all what happens to that
person. It was the misfortune of Miss Salmon to suffer periodically and
acutely from biliousness (which she called neuralgia). In an attack, she
took instantly to her bed and lay there flat on her back, absurdly and
unnecessarily poising her pince-nez, and looking, unquestionably, very
unpleasant. Rosalie,--who believed that Miss Salmon on these occasions
had overeaten herself, the attacks invariably coinciding with pork in
winter and with a fruit trifle known in the boarding house as “Kentish
Delight” in the summer, of both of which Miss Salmon was avowedly fond,
was at first warmly sympathetic and attentive on their occurrence,
anointing the fevered brows with eau-de-Cologne, nipping the unnecessary
pince-nez off the pallid nose, darkening the room, and stealing about
on tiptoe. In time her attitude came to be expressed by her reception
of the sight of Miss Salmon prone, stricken, yellow, pince-nez, poising.
“What, again?”
“Well, now----” (Gulp).
But Rosalie would be gone.
And it came to be the same with all the other fellow inmates of the
boarding house, alike the men and the women. Rosalie, in a colloquialism
of to-day not then coined, “had no use for them.” There was in none of
them anything that aroused her esteem; there was in each of them, in
degree greater or less, much that provoked her scorn. The result was
as resulted from Miss Salmon--she did not bother about them; and not
bothering about them she suffered an inhibition of her sympathies. To
repeat the thing said, her environment here was, as it were, fated
or fatal. In her eagerness for her career, her generous emotions were
likely to be laid aside and to wither; and the environment of the
boarding house in no way drew upon her sympathies.
This was not good for Rosalie.
Moreover, the community of the boarding house served Rosalie ill on
another point. She came there with all those grotesque ideas of her
childhood on the respective positions of men and women precipitated
through her older years to the perception given to Keggo: women
were this, women were that; in their commonest characteristics they
contrasted very badly with men; men did things better than women; they
had by far the better lot in life than women; unquestionably men were
the creatures; of course--off-handedly--they were beasts. She came to
the boarding house with these ideas and the boarding house presented
these ideas to her in living fact and assured her in her ideas. She came
there very susceptible to the qualities she believed to be rooted with
their sex in men and women and she saw those qualities there at once.
The boarding house might have been all her ideas of women and of men
taken away by an artist and put into an exact picture. It was her words
to Keggo in terms of actual life. Its population, little varying, was
always round about twenty; the proportion in sex always in the region
of fifteen women to five men. The figures were always constant and the
characters, when they changed, seemed always to Rosalie to be constant;
the names changed, the personalities did not change. Even the faces did
not change: there are certain types of faces that either are produced
by permanent residence in boarding houses or that go instinctively to
boarding houses for their permanent residence. There is a boarding-house
mould. There would always be two husbands with wives and three men
without wives. The men were never spoken to by any of the women but with
a certain archness which Rosalie detested; and they never spoke to the
women but with a certain boisterousness, a kind of rubbing together of
the hands and a “Ha! What miserable weather, Mrs. Keeley. How does it
suit you? Ha!” which Rosalie equally detested. It was as though the
women, leading boarding-house lives, knew that the men (who were
never in to lunch and sometimes absent from dinner) did not lead
boarding-house lives but secret, dashing and mysterious lives; and as
though the men knew that they lived secret, dashing and mysterious lives
but condescended to the women who lived only boarding-house lives; and
the archness on the one side and the boisterousness on the other
implied tribute and worthiness of tribute. This implication Rosalie also
detested.
Men--as she now saw men and women--she dismissed; generally as “of
course they’re beasts,” severally and in the groups to which they
belonged, as cats--of the cat tribe--tame cats, wild cats, Cheshire
cats, tomcats and stray cats. But she dismissed them. That was her
attitude, as it developed, towards men. They had been, in her regard,
owners of the earth, possessing and having dominion over the round world
and all that therein is, as a stage magician owns and dominates his
stage; they had next been wonderful things but apt to be troublesome and
braggart things whose braggadocio caused you to blink and have a funny
feeling; they had then been sinister and frightening things that caused
poor Anna to say it was hard for women; they became, at last, creatures
that had the best of life, that is to say the better time in life, not
because they merited it, but because it was theirs by tradition and they
stepped into it, or were put into it, as naturally as a man child is
put into trousers; and they had, when all was reckoned up, the better
qualities--largeness, tolerance, directness, explosiveness (as opposed
to smouldering-ness)--not, Rosalie thought, because they were males, but
because they had the position that males have, just as by the habit of
command is given to small boys in the Navy and very young men in the
Army the air and the poise of command.
Yes, certainly men were, as they had always been, the creatures; but the
eyes that formerly saw them as magicians, as by a savage is seen only
the mystery of the moving hands, the tick, and the strike of a
clock, now looked inside the case and saw the works. No mystery.
No exclusiveness of natural power. Nothing abnormal. Men, on their
estimable qualities and position, were what they were merely because,
as the works of a watch, thus and thus the wheels were made to go round.
Easy. Nothing in it. On the contrary. On the contrary, men were the more
despicable in that, dowered as by tradition they were dowered, they yet
were--what they were! The eyes that had been caused to blink by Robert
blowing smoke through his nose and by Harold pulling up his collar and
speaking with a “haw!” sound, blinked from a contempt yet more profound
(because now known for contempt) at the exhibition, seen all about her,
of men’s unlovely side. And she dismissed them. They did not attract her
in the smallest degree. All that they had in them to esteem, whether
of qualities or of position, they had--here was the parallel--in common
with drones in a hive. They had the best of everything; they were
blundering, blustering, noisy, careless, buccaneering owners of the
world, and to her--as all the roystering swarm to any individual worker
bee--to her, negligible. She was a worker bee, busy, purposeful.
There is a special function belonging to drones in a hive. That special
function of men in regard to women was repellant to Rosalie. All that
pertained to it was repulsive to her. She loathed to think of men in
that capacity and she loathed to see women ensnared in that regard by
men. Beautiful cousin Laetitia and the “good match” that obviously had
been found for her: she detested seeing those two together: it made her
feel sick.
Men! By this and by that in passage of time she was in contact with a
good number and a good variety of men. There was the frequently changing
male contribution to the boarding-house community; there were clients
met in the development of her work at Simcox’s; there were the men of
the circle of Uncle Pyke Pounce; there were the men of the circle of
cousin Laetitia, brought to the little Saturday-dinner parties. A very
fair average, a rather wider than the normal average of contact with
men; and she dismissed them. They had not any attraction for her at
all. If, rarely, she met one whose superficial points were superficially
attractive, his contribution to her attitude to men was to make her
blink (inwardly) the more, albeit on a different note. That one so
exceptionally dowered should find pleasure in, for instance, dalliance
of sex! Contemptible! Oh, sickening and contemptible! One Harry Occleve,
of Laetitia’s circle, so obviously “the good match,” was outstandingly
such a case. It was thought upon him, scornful and disgusted thought,
that made her, walking back from one of the Saturday-evening parties--he
was always there--arrange her experiences with men in that analogy
between men and cats which, as related, had been delivered to Miss
Salmon.
Like a tame cat! She never had met a man she despised so much. You’d
think a man like that couldn’t help but be above such things as Cousin
Laetitia and Aunt Belle made of him. “Occleve.” The very name that
he owned had a nice sound; and he was brilliantly clever and looked
brilliantly clever. He was a barrister and Aunt Belle, who was forever
talking about him, had said that evening, just before his arrival, that
some famous counsel had declared of him that he was unquestionably
the most brilliant of the young men of the day at the Bar. So he was
talented, had a great future before him, had a strong, most taking
presence, a commanding air, a voice of uncommon charm--and was in bonds
to Laetitia! Looked sickly at her! Mouthed fatuous nothings with her!
Was obviously marked down to be that “good match” that Laetitia was to
make, and was content, was eager, to be the tame cat of her languishing
glances and of Aunt Belle’s excessive gushings! Was to be seen in
a future not distant mated with Laetitia and sharing with her an
atmosphere of milk and silk and babies and kisses! Tame cat! What an end
to which to bring such qualities! What a desecration of such qualities
to set them to win such an end! Tame cat!
But they all were cats of one kind or another. Yes, men are of the
cat tribe! Tabby cats--the soft, fattish kind, without any manlike
qualities, that seemed to be by far the greater proportion of all the
men one saw about in buses and in the streets and met in business;
tabby cats--sloppy, old-womanish creatures. Cheshire cats--the kind
that grinned out of vacuous minds and that never could speak to a woman
without grinning; the unattached men at the boarding house invariably
were of the Cheshire-cat cats. Tomcats--the beastly ones with lecherous
eyes that looked at you. “Of course they’re beasts.” It had been a large
experience of the tomcat cats that had made her add that final summary
of men to Keggo. The Bashibazook, once or twice encountered in her last
terms at the Sultana’s, though never spoken with, had looked at her in
a horrible way, not understood, but felt to be frightening and horrible;
Mr. Ponders, on a dreadful occasion after handing over the medicine for
Miss Keggs, had horribly said, “Well, now, wouldn’t a kiss be nice?
I think a nice kiss would be very nice.” She had managed to get away
without being touched; the nausea in her eyes perhaps had frightened
him. It was nausea she felt, not fear, a horrible physical sickness;
and finally to round off the “of course they’re beasts” of men as then
experienced and now to fill up the schedule of tomcat cats the friends
of Uncle Pyke Pounce’s circle and Uncle Pyke Pounce himself and the
men like the men of his circle--tomcats something past their prime as
lechers (but at a hint only more lecherous for that) but in the full
prime of their beastliness as guzzlers, who with guzzle eyes eyed their
food. She had come across a word in Carlyle’s “French Revolution” that
instantly brought Uncle Pyke Pounce and his friends to her mind and
that always thereafter she applied to the elderly tomcat encountered
or passed in the street--“atrabilious.” Atrabilious! The very word! She
looked it up in the dictionary, was disappointed to find it did not
mean exactly what she thought it meant, but gave it her own meaning, and
applied it to them. It sounded like them. They had small beady eyes, set
in yellow; no apparent eyelids either above or below, just an unblinking
eye set in a puffy face like a currant in a slab of cold pudding that
gloated or glared at everything and everybody as if it was a thing to
be devoured; guzzlers who gloated upon their food and wallowed in their
soup, always with little streaks of red veins and blue veins in their
faces. Atrabilious! Tomcats!
Wild cats--the roamers, the untamed ones, the ones with cruel and with
wicked faces that made you not sick, but frightened; mostly they were
dressed in rough clothes, men hanging about the streets who patently
were thieves or worse, who looked at you and at once looked all around
as if to see if any were about that might protect you; but often dressed
in gentle dress and then with the cruel and wicked look more cruel and
more wicked, to make your shudder to think of a woman having to belong
to that.
Stray cats--on the whole the only really bearable ones; the lonely ones
that seemed to have lost something or to be lost, that seemed to need
looking after, that made you have a funny tender feeling towards them, a
wanting as it were to pick them up and carry them home and be sharp with
them because they couldn’t take care of themselves, and to be kind to
them also because they couldn’t take care of themselves; yes, the only
bearable ones: Mr. Simcox was precisely one.
All cats, of the cat tribe. There wasn’t one you couldn’t place. There
wasn’t one, save dear little Mr. Simcox and the stray cat ones you
sometimes saw, that was not in some trait contemptible. The only thing
to be said for them was that it was their nature. They were created like
that. You just shrugged your shoulders at them and let them go at that,
negligible entities. Active disgust was only felt of them when one of
their traits was manifested directly towards you; or, much more, when
the sight was given of such a one as this Harry Occleve making such an
exhibition of himself and enjoying it, delighting in it, asking nothing
better than to be philandering with Laetitia, or escorting Laetitia, or
gazing at Laetitia. That did make you angry enough with a man to hate
a man. It was like seeing a good book--as it might be “Lombard
Street”--used to prop a table leg; or a jolly dog--as the dearest Scotch
terrier once brought to the boarding house--led for a walk on a leash by
an old maiden mistress and wearing a lapdog’s flannel coat with ribbon
bows at the corner. Her aversion to Harry Occleve was such that, in
their rare passages together, she was almost openly rude to him. It
seemed there was even no physical quality he had but he used it to abase
himself or to make an exhibition of himself. He had noticeably long,
strong-looking arms, but the sickening thing to see him once using those
arms to hold silk for Laetitia while she wound it! He had a striking
face that she named, from a line in Browning, a “marching” face--“one
who never turned his back but marched breast forward”--but to see that
face bent fatuously towards Laetitia! There radiated from the corners of
his eyes towards his temples those little lines that sailors often have,
“horizon tracks,” she called them; but to see them deeply marked while
he mouthed earnest nothings with Laetitia! There was an odd, nice smell
about him, of peat, of tobacco, of soap, of heather with the wind across
it, of things like that most agreeably mixed, and actually she had heard
Laetitia say to him in the babyish way she spoke to him, “You smoke too
much. You do.” And he, like a moon calf: “Oh, you’re not going to ask me
to give up smoking, are you?” And she with a trailing eye and hint of
a blush, “Perhaps I shall--some day.” And he--a sigh! Positively a
love-sick sigh straight out of a novel! Ah, positively she could detest
the man! She came to discover it as an odd thing that, while commonly
she was entirely indifferent to men, always after a Saturday meeting
with Laetitia’s Harry she had for quite a day or two an active
detestation of them.
But it was the women at the boarding house--to instance the boarding
house--the fifteen women, the immense, straggling army of women as they
looked to be, when they came trooping in to dinner or went trailing out
again, that had Rosalie’s sharpest observation and that best pointed
her youthful estimates. Unlike men who had fallen woefully from her
childhood estimate of them, the women maintained and intensified her
early estimate of women. The women in the boarding house showed Rosalie
what women come to. A few were emphatically old; the rest, with the
single exception of Miss Salmon, were emphatically not old; on the other
hand they were emphatically not young. They were at pains to let you
see they were not old and the pains they were at rather dreadfully (to
Rosalie) emphasised the fact that they were not young. The thing about
them, the warning, the proof that they exhibited of all Rosalie’s ideas
about the inferiority of women, was that they were, in her phrase,
derelicts--not wanted; abandoned; homeless; or they would not be
here. Yes, derelict; and what was worse, derelict not in the sense of
desuetude of powers or of powers outworn, but with the suggestion of
never having had any powers, of having been always the mere vessels of
another’s powers--some man’s; and now, with that power withdrawn--the
man, whether father, brother, lover or husband, gone--derelict as a
ship, abandoned of crew, rudderless and dismasted, is derelict; as an
obscure habitation, cold of hearth, crazy of walls, abandoned to decay,
is derelict. She summed them all up as having arrived at what they
were precisely because in their earlier years they had been what in
her childhood she had supposed women to be: inferior creatures at the
disposal and for the benefit and service of men. What a warning never to
be that! There they were--manless. And therefore derelict. And because
derelict for such a reason, therefore testimony to a social condition
that was abominable, and because seen to be abominable never, never
herself should enfold. Never! Manless. Husbandless. There they were,
the straggling mob of them,--deserted by husbands, semi-detached from
husbands, relict of husbands fallen out with a stitch in the side in the
race for husbands. Urh!
She was very young, Rosalie.
“Despised and rejected of men,” she said to Miss Salmon, holding forth
in their bedroom on her subject. “That’s what I call them. Despised and
rejected of men. Oh, don’t hum louder than ever. It’s not irreverent to
say that. It describes a condition, that’s all, and I’m using it because
it describes this condition, their condition, exactly. It does. You can
hum; but it does. They’ve never done anything, they’ve never meant to
do anything, they’ve never tried to do anything except hang round after
some man. That’s all. They’ve either caught him and now lost him; or
they’ve missed him and now go on missing him. That’s their lives. That’s
nearly any woman’s life. It’s not going to be mine. If anything were
wanted to make the whole idea of marriage and all that repulsive to
me--and nothing is wanted--that would. Despised and rejected of men! I
used to think and to say I intended to be like a man and to do a man’s
work and have a man’s share. I tell you that even getting so close to
a man as that--I mean as close as intentional emulation of him--even
getting as close as that makes me feel sick now. It’s my own life I’m
going to have, my own place, my own share; not modelled on any one
else’s. If it were conceivable that I ever met a man I cared tuppence
about--but it isn’t conceivable; that’s a quality that’s been left clean
out of me, thank goodness--but if it were conceivable, what I’d offer
would be just to share; to go on living my own way and he his--Oh,
your humming! I mean after marriage, of course; I think this free-love
business they talk about is even more detestable than the lawful
kind--just animalism. That’s all I’d do. Me my life; he his life;
meeting, as equals, when it was convenient to meet. I’d like to bring
all these poets and people who write about love into our dining-room to
see those people. That’d teach them!
Man’s love is of his life a thing apart;
‘Tis woman’s whole existence.
What an existence!”
“Well, now--” (gulp).