They looked less set up like that in a row than when they had lain about on the floor of the den ... taking up Dante and Beethoven at tea time.
2
“Books posted? I wonder I’m not more rushed. I say—v’you greased all Hancock’s and the Pater’s instruments?”
He knows I’m slacking ... he’ll tell the others when they come back....
Mr. Leyton’s door shut with a bang. He would be sitting reading the newspaper until the next patient came. The eternal sounds of laughter and dancing came up from the kitchen. The rest of the house was perfectly still. Her miserable hand reopened the last page of the Index. There were five or six more entries under “Woman.”
3
If one could only burn all the volumes; stop the publication of them. But it was all books, all the literature in the world, right back to Juvenal ... whatever happened, if it could all be avenged by somebody in some way, there was all that ... the classics, the finest literature,—“unsurpassed.” Education would always mean coming in contact with all that. Schoolboys got their first ideas.... How could Newnham and Girton women endure it? How could they go on living and laughing and talking?
And the modern men were the worst ... “we can now, with all the facts in our hands sit down and examine her at our leisure.” There was no getting away from the scientific facts ... inferior; mentally, morally, intellectually and physically ... her development arrested in the interest of her special functions ... reverting later towards the male type ... old women with deep voices and hair on their faces ... leaving off where boys of eighteen began. If that is true everything is as clear as daylight. “Woman is not undeveloped man but diverse” falls to pieces. Woman is undeveloped man ... if one could die of the loathsome visions ... I must die. I can’t go on living in it ... the whole world full of creatures; half-human. And I am one of the half-human ones or shall be if I don’t stop now.
Boys and girls were much the same ... women stopped being people and went off into hideous processes. What for? What was it all for? Development. The wonders of science. The wonders of science for women are nothing but gynæcology—all those frightful operations in the “British Medical Journal” and those jokes—the hundred golden rules.... Sacred functions ... highest possibilities ... sacred for what? The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world? The Future of the Race? What world? What race? Men.... Nothing but men; forever.
If by one thought all the men in the world could be stopped, shaken and slapped. There must, somewhere be some power that could avenge it all ... but if these men were right there was not. Nothing but Nature and her decrees. Why was nature there? Who started it? If nature “took good care” this and that ... there must be somebody. If there was a trick there must be a trickster. If there is a god who arranged how things should be between men and women and just let it go and go on I have no respect for him. I should like to give him a piece of my mind....