“Shayle—is that the name of the ruined healer on your passport?”
“Oh, the world was mistaken about him, Your Majesty. Dear Clarke Shayle—he said I saved him.”
“Let us hope not, you slave to tradition!” His Highness snapped. “If you knew the deplorable failure I’ve made trying to get bad results from women, you’d agree that I’d best stick to my last—and first—the men. However, since you’ve been séancing with me evenings, certain possibilities of making your sex serve my purposes have opened up before me. In the past my idea has been that the more I could keep women under, the worse the world would be. You have changed my slogan to ‘Turn ’em loose’.”
“I?”
For a moment Satan enjoyed the admixture of humbleness and indignation in her query.
“Nice work,” he commented. “Such feminism may be made the most dynamic evil in the universe by one who masters it. De Maupassant thought he had, but his ideas of women were limited to types of his time. I have the one mind that can look at your sex unbiased by sentiment. As I had no mother, all women are before, none behind me. The male may go on and on indefinitely with sex villainies. But the female is likely to learn from one indecency, her Swan Song, as it were. Yet her lamentable limitations need not discourage us, since wars have made the fair population exceed—shall I say, the foul? ‘By their works ye shall know them.’ Your works I know. Ergo, I know you. Unlike your friend of the employment agency, I fit the position to the applicant. Here is the job I had created for you.”
He would make her manager, accountable only to himself, of the woman’s department of the mortal world; would teach her the psychology of spiritual communication, so that she might personally direct important cases, as did he in his own field; would place under her charge a school of female fiends whom she might entrust with missions on earth as soon as she deemed them sufficiently proficient in her subtleties, even as he did his demon sleuths.
To appeal, to obtain, to destroy—was not that the mission of her sex? And yet so long had women been burden-bearers, deprived of initiative by the master’s rein and hoppled by the ultimate of man-made laws, that even he who so sorely needed them, had failed to appreciate their suppressed power. Never would they come into their own until they learned that their capability lay, not in trying to be what they were not, but in being essentially and ruthlessly what they were.
“Ah, wrigglier than a she-cobra’s wriggle is the female of my dreams!” Glowing from that ruddy mist of concentration which once before Dolores had seen, His Highness warmed to his thought. “If all the anarchists in my incubators were matured, they’d be a puny menace to society and the State as compared with women let loose. Take the punitive laws from any class and what is the result? Riot, bestiality, sin. Fear is what has held women down. Take away fear and what will they do? They’ll master the men. Once give ’em license and they’ll soon make up for their enforced virtue of the past. The fact that they do not originate is their best-worst trait—saves a lot of energy. Why, when I contemplate their daring, their imperviousness to pain, their concentration through heredity upon the meaner issues; when I allow myself to imagine the deafening pop of the bottled-up indignities poured upon them in the past—Whew! I, the First and Last, shudder in humility over my virtues. This I give you as a prophecy: To the female of the species is the victory of vice.”
Dolores was lifted above fear for herself by fear for womankind.