Her sympathy was real. Notwithstanding that it gave her more of his attention, she fretted for him too. When the next day they met at the foot of Penlock Hill and she found him without his satchel, she was genuinely disappointed and unhappy.
"Aren't you sufficiently selfish," he asked, "to be sensible of the obvious fact that I'd far sooner talk to you than spend my time in useless efforts?"
"Perhaps it isn't in the nature of women to be really selfish," she said, with a laugh to lighten her meaning.
That set them at discussion upon the comparative selfishness of the sexes as they mounted the hill and took the beaten path across the heather.
For a man, he had strange points of view to her. With an honest bitterness, he complained about the selfishness of men.
"But what else can we be?" said he. "As things are, what else can we be? We run the world and this civilization's our conception of the measures on which it has to be run, and this civilization is built up on a solid rock of egotism and selfishness, with brute force to insist upon the upholding of the standard. I wonder what would happen," he went on, "if fair women, as Meredith visioned, rose in revolt. I wonder what would happen if they suddenly combined to refuse to give the world the material it builds its civilization with. I wonder where our brute force would come in then. What sort of children should we have if women had to be taken by brute force? And should we so take them if really they were to resist? Brute force has been opposed only with brute force. Our highest conception is that the strongest brute force wins. I wonder what brute force would do if it were opposed with the force of the spiritual ideals that women have and scarcely are awake to even yet. Are you awake to the spiritual ideals in you?"
He looked at her suddenly as they walked and as suddenly and as firmly she said--
"Yes."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "You're the first woman I've ever met who would have answered as straight and direct as that. All the rest would have hedged and shilly-shallied. Some would have giggled. Half of them would frankly not have known what I meant."
"I know very well what you mean," she replied. "But if you're surprised at a woman knowing, I don't think you're any more surprised than I am at a man asking the question. How did you know to begin with that women have spiritual ideals at all, strong enough ever to think of their being ranged against brute force?"