"I used to laugh at you!"
"Everybody starts by laughing at people in love," I said, settling myself on that wall. "And everybody ends by being quite as silly themselves. You're no worse than anybody else."
"Yes I am, much," declared Elizabeth.
"Why? Because you've always thought you couldn't like men, and now you find you can?"
"No!" declared Elizabeth, shaking still more vigorously. "I still can't like 'men.' It is still true enough about that. I still hate them! ... You don't mind my talking, do you? I've bottled myself up so ever since I met him. But as for 'men'——"
She talked, setting out plainly and sincerely what I do believe is the attitude of a certain type of girl.
* * * * * * *
Men seldom hear it. If they do, they disbelieve it. But let them—if any of them are reading this story—be reminded that this point of view exists. Here's its creed as told me by my bonniest and best of little pals, Elizabeth Weare.
I'd heard lots of it, in scraps, already. Tonight, when she was stirred and troubled, I got it in swathes, which I scarcely interrupted.
"I don't think men are amusing," she declared. "Perhaps I have no sense of humour. If it is sense of humour that makes their smoking-room stories funny, I am glad I haven't. They think those stories funny, I think them far-fetched; as if they'd been thought out with lots of trouble. It's not the improperness of them that I mind, those that are supposed to be so 'naughty.' It's the ugly sort of pictures they nearly always make. Think of any you know; don't they mean something rather horrid to look at? Men haven't enough imagination to see that's what one hates. Men laugh at those 'jokes,' with a noise like the Prices' old Jack, braying. And they tell some of them to their wives. And the wives pass them on. And the girls tell me; pretty girls, with their soft red mouths, repeat these hideous stupid Limericks and things. And I feel like crying, Joan. Only I have to laugh, or they'd think I didn't understand. What I do understand is that every time I've been put a little bit more off men!