The Trilby art-student put in shyly, "Doesn't that show that they're well bred?"
Miss Armitage, the Socialist, fixing her through her glasses, demanded, "When you sy 'Well bred' d'you mean the dogs are—or the women that don't cry?"
"Well—both, perhaps," ventured the art-student, blushing as she helped herself to jam. Miss Armitage, with her little superior smile, gave out, "There's no such thing as well bred, what you mean by it. What you mean's just pewer snobbery. The reel meaning of well bred is somebody who is specially gifted in mind and body. Well, all you can say of the minds of Army people is that they haven't got any. And I don't know that I'm impressed by their bodies."
Here a student of music from the other side of the table said she saw what Miss Armitage meant, exactly. Only, as for Army people, Gwenna Williams couldn't have been called that. Her people were just sort of Welsh Dissenters, awfully against soldiers and that kind of thing.
"Doesn't matter. She's the sort of girl who's just like a chameleon: takes all her colour from the man she's supposed to be in love with," said Miss Armitage loftily. "She'll know that she'll never keep him unless she's just like the class of women he thinks most of. (As it is, I don't see what that empty-headed girl's got to keep a man with.) So, as I say, she'll suppress her own identity, and grow the kind 'He' happens to like."
The art-student murmured that she supposed it didn't really matter, a girl doing that. Provided that the new "identity" which was "grown to please the man" were a better one than the old.
Miss Armitage the Feminist, sniffed; silent with contempt for this idea. Then she turned again to the student of music, to conclude the summing-up of the new bride's character.
"She'll be positively stimulated and buoyed-up, all the time, by the thought that 'He' considered it plucky of her to go on as if she was quite pleased that he was fighting!" declared the lecturer. "You see! By and by she'll believe she is pleased. She'll catch the whole detestable Jingow spirit, I know. Syme attitude of mind as the Zulu who runs amuck at the sound of a drum. Hysterical, that's what I call what's at the root of it all!"
But whatever Miss Armitage, the Cockney suffragette, chose to call it, it was there, that Spirit.