“Never,” laughed Armitage. “I never claw my own sore spots. There’s no fun in that. Always claw the other fellow’s. There’s a laugh and distraction for your own troubles in seeing him wince.”
“Is that why you’ve been clawing mine?” said I.
We were pausing before his big house, at the corner of the Avenue. “If I have been I didn’t know it,” said he. He glanced up at his windows with a satirical smile. “This evening I’ve been breaking my rule and clawing at my own.” He put out his hand. “Let the social business take its course,” advised he with impressive friendliness. “You and I can’t make the world over. To fight against the inevitable merely increases everyone’s discomfort.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said I.
I agreed with his conclusion that it was best to let things alone, though I reached that conclusion by a different route. I had in mind my forlorn hope of good results from a homeopathic treatment. I saw how impossible it was to undo the practically completed training of a grown girl. I appreciated the absurdity of an attempt radically to change Edna’s character—an absurdity as great as an attempt to make her a foot taller or to alter the color of her eyes. The one hope, it seemed to me—and I still think I was right—was that, when they had social position, when there should no longer be excuse for fretting lest some one were thinking them common, they might calm down toward some sort of sanity.
Bear in mind, please, that at the time I did not have the situation, nor any idea of it, and of how to deal with it, definitely and clearly in mind. I was groping, was seeing dimly, was not even sure that I saw at all. I was like a thousand other busy American men who, after years of absorption in affairs, are abruptly and rudely awakened to the fact that there is something wrong at home where they had been flattering themselves everything was all right.
The things Armitage had said occupied my mind, almost to the exclusion of my business. The longer I revolved them, the better I understood the situation at home. I could not but wonder what wretched catastrophe in his domestic life had made him so insultingly bitter against women. I felt that he was unfair to them; any judgment that condemned a class for possessing universal human weakness must be unfair. At the same time I believed he had excuse for being unfair—the excuse of a man whose domestic life is in ruins. I began to see toward the bottom of the woman question—the nature and the cause of the crisis through which women were passing.
The modern world, as I had read history enough to know, had suddenly and completely revolutionized the conditions of life. The male sex, though poorly where at all equipped to meet the new conditions, still was compelled to meet them after a fashion. A river that for ages has moved quietly along in a deep bed, all in a night swells to many times its former size and plays havoc with the surrounding country. That was a fairly good figure for the new life science and machinery had suddenly forced upon the human race. The men living in the inundated region—where floods were unknown, where appliances, even ideas for combating them did not exist—the men, hastily, hysterically, incompetently, but with resolution and persistence, because forced by dire necessity, would proceed to deal with that vast new river. Just so were the men of our day dealing with the life of steam and electricity, of ancient landmarks of religion and morality swept away or shifted, of ancient industrial and social relations turned upside down and inside out. The men were coping with the situation after a fashion. But the women?
These unfortunate creatures, faced with the new conditions, were in their greater ignorance and incapacity and helplessness, trying to live as if nothing had occurred!—as if the old order still existed. And the men, partly through ignorance, partly through preoccupation with the new order, partly through indifference and contempt veiled as consideration for the weaker sex, were encouraging them in their fatal folly. Was it strange that the women were deceived, remained unconscious of their peril? No, it was on the contrary inevitable. When men, though working away under and at the new conditions, still talked as if the old conditions prevailed, when preachers still preached that way, and orators still eulogized the thing that was dead and buried as if it lived and reigned, when in order to find out the change you had to disregard the speech, the professions, the confident assertions of all mankind and observe closely their actions only—when there was this universal unawareness and unpreparedness, how could the poor women be condemned?
I could not but admit to myself that in his account of the doings of the women Armitage was only slightly if at all exaggerating. But with my more judicial temperament that had won me fortune and leadership while hardly more than a youth, I could not join him in damning the women for their folly and idleness and uselessness.