"Very well," she said, giving him her hand with a gay gesture of capitulation. "But didn't you say that men liked to climb? Well, women do, too."
They were conscious of being late for dinner and they turned their faces toward home.
"How ridiculous," remarked Wander, "that we should think ourselves obliged to return for dinner!"
"On the contrary," said Kate, "I think it bears witness to both our health and our sanity. I've got over being afraid that I shall be injured by the commonplace. When I open your door and smell the roast or the turnips or whatever food has been provided, I shall like it just as well as if it were flowers."
Wander helped her down a jagged descent and laughed up in her face.
"What a materialist!" he cried. "And I thought you were interested only in the ideal."
"Things aren't ideal because they have been labeled so," declared Kate. "When people tell you they are clinging to old ideals, it's well to find out if they aren't napping in some musty old room beneath the cobwebs. I'm a materialist, very likely, but that's only incidental to my realism. I like to be allowed to realize the truth about things, and you know yourself that you men--who really are the sentimental sex--have tried as hard as you could not to let us."
"You speak as if we had deliberately fooled you."
"You haven't fooled us any more than we have fooled ourselves." They had reached the lower level now, and could walk side by side. "You've kept us supplemental, and we've thought we were noble when we played the supplemental part. But it doesn't look so to us any longer. We want to be ourselves and to justify ourselves. There's a good deal of complaint about women not having enough to do--about the factories and shops taking their work away from them and leaving them idle and inexpressive. Well, in a way, that's true, and I'm a strong advocate of new vocations, so that women can have their own purses and all that. But I know in my heart all this is incidental. What we really need is a definite set of principles; if we can acquire an inner stability, we shall do very well whether our hands are perpetually occupied or not. But just at present we poor women are sitting in the ruins of our collapsed faiths, and we haven't decided what sort of architecture to use in erecting the new one."
"There doesn't seem to be much peace left in the world," mused Wander. "Do you women think you will have peace when you get this new faith?"