Miss Walbrook, the elder, had this in common with Miss Henrietta Towell, that she believed it best for everyone to work out his own salvation. Barbara had her personal life to live, and while her aunt would help her to live it, she wouldn’t guide her choice. She continued, therefore, to scan the paper till her niece should say something more.
She said it, not because she wanted to give information, but because she was temperamentally outspoken. “I begin to wish there were no men in the world. If women are men in a higher stage of development, why didn’t men die out, so that we could be rid of them? Isn’t that what we generally get from the survival of the fittest?”
Miss Walbrook’s thin, clear smile suggested the edge of a keenly tempered blade. “I’ve never said that women were men in a higher stage of development. I’ve said that in their parallel states of development women had advanced a stage beyond men. You may say of every generation born that women begin where men leave off. I suppose that that’s what’s meant by the myth of Eve springing from Adam’s side. It was to be noticed even then, in the prehistoric, in the age that formed the great legends. Adam was asleep, when Eve as a vital force leaped away from him. If it wasn’t for Eve’s vitality the human race would still be in the Stone Age.”
Barbara harked back to what for her was the practical. “Some of us are in the Stone Age as it is. I’m sure Rash Allerton is as nearly an elemental as one can be, and still belong to clubs and drive in motorcars.”
Miss Walbrook risked her principles of non-interference so far as to say: “It’s part of our feminine lack of development that we’re always inclined to look back on the elemental with pity, and even with regret. The woman was never born who didn’t have in her something of Lot’s wife.”
“Thank you, Aunt Marion. In a way that lets me out. If I’m no weaker than the rest of my sex––”
“Than many of the rest of your sex.”
“Very well, then; than many of the rest of my sex; if I’m no weaker than that I don’t have to lose my self-respect.”