“Margaret has just told me that Doctor Penrose has been up to see Beulah and pronounces it a case of nervous breakdown. He wants her to try out psycho-analysis, and that sort of thing. He seems to feel that it’s serious. Margaret is fearfully upset, poor girl. So’m I, to tell the truth.”
“And so am I,” Peter acknowledged to himself as he hung up the receiver. He was so absorbed during the evening that one of the ladies—the wife of the fat banker—found him extremely dull and decided against asking him to dinner with his sister. The wife of the thin banker, who was in his charge at the theater, got the benefit of his effort to rouse himself and grace the occasion creditably, and found him delightful. By the time the evening was over he had decided that Beulah should be 224 pulled out of whatever dim world of dismay and delusion she might be wandering in, at whatever cost. It was unthinkable that she should be wasted, or that her youth and splendid vitality should go for naught.
He found her eager to talk to him the next night when he went to see her.
“Peter,” she said, “I want you to go to my aunt and my mother, and tell them that I’ve got to go on with my work,—that I can’t be stopped and interrupted by this foolishness of doctors and nurses. I never felt better in my life, except for not being able to sleep, and I think that is due to the way they have worried me. I live in a world they don’t know anything about, that’s all. Even if they were right, if I am wearing myself out soul and body for the sake of the cause, what business is it of theirs to interfere? I’m working for the souls and bodies of women for ages to come. What difference does it make if my soul and body suffer? Why shouldn’t they?” Her eyes narrowed. Peter observed the unnatural light in them, the apparent dryness of her lips, the two bright spots burning below her cheek-bones.
“Because,” he answered her slowly, “I don’t 225 think it was the original intention of Him who put us here that we should sacrifice everything we are to the business of emphasizing the superiority of a sex.”
“That isn’t the point at all, Peter. No man understands, no man can understand. It’s woman’s equality we want emphasized, just literally that and nothing more. You’ve pauperized and degraded us long enough—”
“Thou canst not say I—” Peter began.
“Yes, you and every other man, every man in the world is a party to it.”
“I had to get her going,” Peter apologized to himself, “in order to get a point of departure. Not if I vote for women, Beulah, dear,” he added aloud.
“If you throw your influence with us instead of against us,” she conceded, “you’re helping to right the wrong that you have permitted for so long.”