"I can hear you, Clarissa, if you speak less oratorically. We are not in an audience-room," suggested her husband.
Clarissa was slender, fair, and dramatic. If she was in the room you looked at her. Her Norman nose was delicately cut, her manner fastidious, but her collars were carelessly put on, and her neckties had a vaguely one-sided effect. She just escaped being pretty and precise and reliable-looking by a narrow margin, but escape she did. She was, instead, disturbing, distracting, decidedly lovable, not a little pathetic. Her face was dreamy, yet acute--the face of an enthusiast. The line of her jaw was firmly and beautifully drawn; her intellectual activity was undeniable, but philistines {136} mistrusted her conclusions at sight--and justly.
"This is not a good day on which to hold an argument," she went on with dignity, ignoring her husband's sub-acid comment. "It is too easy to be uncivil when one is so uncomfortable. But I have been thinking about these matters for a long time. I have been forming my resolutions. They are not lightly taken. I was almost ready, in any event, to tell you that I had decided to renounce the domestic life."
"To--?"
"To renounce the domestic life," repeated Clarissa with emphasis. "Homes are an anachronism at the end of the nineteenth century, anyhow. It is time women had the courage of their convictions and sloughed off an anti-social form of habitat that dates from the Stone Age."
{137}
"Do you mean you would rather board?"
Clarissa stared. "What has boarding to do with it?" she inquired rather haughtily. "I am talking about the universal problem of woman's work. One's own individual makeshifts do not affect that. But if it is ever to be solved, some woman must solve it. Men never will. Sacrifices will have to be made for it, as for other causes. There are women who are ready to make them--and I have discovered that I am one of the women."
Professor Charleroy received this statement in absolute silence.
"As a temporary alleviation," Clarissa went on meditatively, "families might be associated upon some group-system. The operating expenses of the individual establishments would be greatly reduced, and the surplus {138} could be applied to developing the higher life of the members of the group. It would be quite practicable, even in our present crude civilization, to arrange such groups. But of course that would be a temporary expedient. In the redeemed form of social life, it will not be necessary."