“Of all the militant sisterhood,” said Mr Brown, “the bright particular star. It was she, if you remember, who chained herself to the wheel of the Prime Minister’s carriage, just as he was about to enter it to drive to the House of Commons, and so forced him to seek his infamous destination on foot. A woman of extraordinary resource and originality.”
“Extraordinary,” said Gilead. “If I recollect, she was nearly killed by the horses becoming restive before she could be released.”
“She would have been glad to die, sir,” said Brown, “in that glorious situation—a second St Catherine broken on the wheel for her faith.” He looked at his visitor searchingly. “Do not distress me, Mr Balm,” he said, “by affirming that the cause is to be denied its share of the vast resources at your disposal. No, no, you must be with us, sir. It was for that purpose that I wrote to you; it was for that purpose that I identified myself in my letter with a name calculated to shed refulgence on any propaganda to which it should elect to give itself—the name of Mrs Craddock Flight. That name, sir, and that cause lack nothing but the devotion of a sympathetic capitalist to ensure their immortality. It was to that stately name that I questioned the right application of so sugary an epithet as ‘sweet’. Finally, sir, that name—if I may dare the confidence—has pledged itself to become, on a single condition, my priceless possession; to adorn with its widowed lustre my no less widowed insignificance. I confess, sir, that I yearn to bask in that reflected glory—to follow in the tail of its comet-like flight to the new world its radiance is destined to discover to the enraptured vision of posterity.”
“You allude—?” said Gilead.
“I allude,” said Mr Brown, “to a world reconsecrated, through the political enfranchisement of woman, to reason, justice and purity. Everything, you will grant, is wrong as it is. Civilization, as a male imposition, has proved itself a depressing failure. Men, on true premises, labour to false conclusions; women, on false, jump to true. Their unerring moral sensitiveness penetrates all massed and complicated sophistries, and pierces in a flash to the heart of the real. Unbiassed by formulas, untrammelled by dogma, they will blow through our corrupt institutions like a cleansing gale, whirling the dead leaves of discredited systems before them. Woman is not conscientious, so to speak, in the prescriptive sense. She will strip from equity, justice and the moral law the trappings in which they have been too long confounded, and show us nature again, primitive and fearless.”
“Indeed?” said Gilead. “You surprise me.”
“There will be many surprises when the time comes,” said Mr Brown grandiloquently; and, on the very word, suffered a surprising change of countenance. “Why, why,” he cried, flushing scarlet; “my letter—my letter, sir, in which I expatiated at some length on this very subject. You have not seen it, you say? To what, then, am I to attribute the honour of your visit?”
“To an advertisement, sir,” said Gilead quietly, “about a dog.”
The effect of his words was startling. Mr Brown seemed to burst at the head, like an over-charged bottle of ginger-beer, and thence to spout a volume of incoherent expletives. He then, as if impelled by some uncontrollable emotion, went racing up and down the room, until, the pressure slacking, he gradually slowed, and finally came to a stop opposite his visitor, the steam, so to speak, all out of him.
“I see it all,” he said, in a state of the limpest depression. “By an irony of circumstance scarce credible, the sympathies I sought to engage have been forestalled by my own child in a trivial matter.”