“But, Ruthie,” Helen said, her eyes big and moist, “each seems to know just what the other is thinking about. Sometimes papa says a word, and sometimes Tom; and the other nods and there is perfect understanding. It—it’s almost uncanny.”
“I think I know what you mean,” said the more observant girl of the Red Mill. “We grew up some time ago, Helen. And you know we have rather thought of Tom as a boy, still.
“But he is a man now. There is a difference in the sexes in their attitude to this war which should establish in all our minds that we are not equal.”
“Who aren’t equal?” demanded Helen, almost wrathfully, for she was a militant feminist.
“Men and women are not equal, dear. And they never will be. Wearing mannish clothes and doing mannish labor will never give women the same outlook upon life that men have. And when men encourage us to believe that our minds are the same as theirs, they do it almost always for their own selfish ends—or because there is something feminine about their minds.”
“Traitor!” cried Helen.
“No,” sighed Ruth. “Only honesty.
“Tom and his father understand each other’s thoughts and feelings as you and your father never could. After all, in the strongest association between father and daughter there is the barrier of sex that cannot be surmounted. You know yourself, Helen, that at a certain point you consider your father much of a big boy and treat him accordingly. That, they tell us, is the ‘mother instinct’ in the female, and I guess it is.
“On the other hand, I have seen girls and their mothers together (we never had mothers after we were little kiddies, Helen, and we’ve missed it) but I have seen such perfect understanding and appreciation between mothers and their daughters that it was as though the same soul dwelt in two bodies.”
Helen sniffed in mingled scorn and doubt over Ruth’s philosophy. Then she said in an aggrieved tone: “But papa and Tom ought not to shut me out of their lives—even in a small way.”