“I don’t see why. You are much stronger than we are. You all think that you have much more pride. You always say that you have a sense of honour which we can’t understand. I should think that with all those advantages you would be much too proud to insist upon our making allowances for you.”
“That’s rather keen, you know,” answered Brook, with a laugh. “All the same, it’s a woman’s occupation to be good, and a man has a lot of other things to do besides. That’s the plain English of it. When a woman isn’t good she falls. When a man is bad, he doesn’t—it’s his nature.”
“Oh—if you begin by saying that all men are bad! That’s an odd way out of it.”
“Not at all. Good men and bad women are the exceptions, that’s all—in the way you mean goodness and badness.”
“And how do you think I mean goodness and badness? It seems to me that you are taking a great deal for granted, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Brook, growing vague on a sudden. “Those are rather hard things to talk about.”
“I like to talk about them. How do you think I understand those two words?”
“I don’t know,” repeated Johnstone, still more vaguely. “I suppose your theory is that men and women are exactly equal, and that a man shouldn’t do what a woman ought not to do—and all that, you know. I don’t exactly know how to put it.”
“I don’t see why what is wrong for a woman should be right for a man,” said Clare. “The law doesn’t make any difference, does it? A man goes to prison for stealing or forging, and so does a woman. I don’t see why society should make any distinction about other things. If there were a law against flirting, it would send the men to prison just like the women, wouldn’t it?”
“What an awful idea!” laughed Brook.