"At first I thought that she was as puritanic in her virtue as she was rigid and forbidding in appearance. One of them was unusually pretty and I attempted to please her. My efforts were in vain, until I found out that she took me for a Greek from Soho Square, which in London is something like the poor quarters of our Piræus. She had never heard of Athens or of ancient history, and she believed that Joan of Arc was the daughter of Noah.
"When I saw that, I dropped occasionally the remark that my uncle was Lord Pericles, and that the King of Sparta had reasons to hide from me his wife. This did it at once. She changed completely. Everything I said was 'interesting.' When I said, 'Wet to-day,' she swore that it was a capital joke. She admired my very gloves. She never tired asking me questions about the 'swell set.' I told her all that I did not know. The least man of my acquaintance was a lord; my friends were all viscounts and marquesses; my dog was the son of a dog in the King's kennels; my motor was one in which three earls and their wives had broken eleven legs of theirs.
"These broken legs brought me very much nearer to my goal; and when finally I apprised her that I had hopelessly spoilt my digestion at the wedding meal of the Duke of D'Ontexist, she implored me not to trifle any longer with her feelings. I stopped trifling.
"This experience," Alcibiades continued, "did much to enlighten me about what was behind all that forbidding exterior of the middle-class woman. I discovered Eve in the Mediæval form of womanhood. I was reminded of the Spartan women who, at the first meeting, seemed so proud, unapproachable and Amazonian; at the second meeting they had lost some of their prohibitive temper; and at the third meeting they proved to be women, and nothing but women after all.
"Honestly, I preferred the English middle-class woman in her first stage. It suited the somewhat rigid style of her beauty much better. In the last or sentimental stage she was much less interesting. Her tenderness was flabby or childish. Then she cried after every rendez-vous. That annoyed me considerably. One evening I could not help asking her whether she did not feel like sending five pounds of conscience-money to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She drew the line on that, and cried more profusely. Whereupon I proposed to send fifty pounds of conscience-money and to be released of any further tears. This seemed to pacify and to console her; and thus we parted.
"A few days after I had been relieved of my first lady friend in England," Alcibiades continued, "I made the acquaintance of a girl whose age I was unable to determine. She said she was twenty-nine years old. However, I soon found that all unmarried girls d'un certain âge in England are exactly twenty-nine years old.
"She was not without certain attractions. She had read much, spoke fluently, had beautiful auburn hair and white arms. In her technical terms, which she used very frequently, she was not very felicitous. She repeatedly mixed up bigotry with bigamy, or with trigonometry. My presence did not seem to affect her very much, and after two or three calls I discovered that she was in a chronic state of rebellion against society and law at large.
"She held that women were in absolute serfdom to men, and that unless women were given the most valuable of rights, that is, the suffrage, neither women nor men could render the commonwealth what it ought to be. I told her that shortly after my disappearance from the political stage of Athens, about twenty-three centuries ago, the women of that town, together with those of other towns, clamoured for the same object. 'What?' she exclaimed. 'Do you mean to say that suffragettes were already known in those olden times?' I assured her that all that she had told me about the aims and arguments of herself and her friends was as old as the comedies of Aristophanes. That seemed to have a strange effect upon her. I noticed that what she believed to be the novelty of the movement constituted really its greatest charm for her. She had thought that suffragettism was the very latest fashion, in every way brand new.
"But after a time she recovered and said: 'Very well; if our objects and aims are as old as all that, they are sure to be even more solidly founded in reason than I thought they were.'