“She wanted to be thought clever,” said the Man of Wrath. “What puzzled me,” he went on musingly, “was that she went away apparently as serene and happy as when she came. The explanation of the principles of bimetallism produce, as a rule, a contrary effect.”
“Why, she hadn’t been listening,” cried Irais, “and your simple star had been making a fine goose of himself the whole evening.
“Prattle, prattle, simple star,
Bimetallic, wunderbar.
Though you’re given to describe
Woman as a dummes Weib.
You yourself are sillier far,
Prattling, bimetallic star!”
“No doubt she had understood very little,” said the Man of Wrath, taking no notice of this effusion.
“And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t understood much either.” Irais was plainly irritated.
“Your opinion of woman,” said Minora in a very small voice, “is not a high one. But, in the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no one could take her place?”
“If you are thinking of hospital-nurses,” I said, “I must tell you that I believe he married chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a strange woman to nurse him when he is sick.”
“But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way her illusions were being knocked about, “the sick-room is surely the very place of all others in which a woman’s gentleness and tact are most valuable.”
“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of Wrath. “I have never met those qualities in the professional nurse. According to my experience, she is a disagreeable person who finds in private nursing exquisite opportunities for asserting her superiority over ordinary and prostrate mankind. I know of no more humiliating position for a man than to be in bed having his feverish brow soothed by a sprucely-dressed strange woman, bristling with starch and spotlessness. He would give half his income for his clothes, and probably the other half if she would leave him alone, and go away altogether. He feels her superiority through every pore; he never before realised how absolutely inferior he is; he is abjectly polite, and contemptibly conciliatory; if a friend comes to see him, he eagerly praises her in case she should be listening behind the screen; he cannot call his soul his own, and, what is far more intolerable, neither is he sure that his body really belongs to him; he has read of ministering angels and the light touch of a woman’s hand, but the day on which he can ring for his servant and put on his socks in private fills him with the same sort of wildness of joy that he felt as a homesick schoolboy at the end of his first term.”
Minora was silent. Irais’s foot was livelier than ever. The Man of Wrath stood smiling blandly down upon us. You can’t argue with a person so utterly convinced of his infallibility that he won’t even get angry with you; so we sat round and said nothing.