“I like a woman,” said he, “who exhales femininity at every pore. That is to say, one who is above all things modest and even somewhat shy; one who says little, does not trouble her head about the arts or sciences, or about intellectual pursuits, when compared with the interests of the home. There I imagine her supreme; calm, serene, orderly, diffusing a spirit of comfort, an atmosphere of peace, wherever she appears. She has no thought of “Society” in the modern slang sense, because for her Society is concentrated in her home, in the little circle of human beings who depend upon her, as they would upon an all-wise, all-providing, all-healing fairy, for help and sympathy and sunny kindness.”
“What you want is a housekeeper who will darn your socks, cook your mutton chop, and give her whole mind, what she has of it, to making you comfortable,” said Repton, scoffingly.
“Not altogether that, though socks are more comfortable when darned than when in holes, as we occasionally wear them at present, and chops are undoubtedly better cooked than raw,” replied Bayre, suavely.
“What do you think of his precious feminine ideal, Southerley?” asked Repton, with a superb raising of his light eyebrows.
“I think it’s all jolly rot,” said Ted, promptly. “I don’t mean I disapprove of a woman’s being domestic in her tastes—somebody must look after the house, and see to the dinner and all that sort of thing, I suppose; and certainly none of those things would get done very well if they were left to me—but a woman who had her hands always in dough or in dusters, whose mind was divided between her saucepan and her cotton reels, would drive me mad.”
“Do you want small talk and Society slip-slop, then, as accomplishments?” sneered Bayre.
“No,” said Southerley. “What I admire in a woman is spirit and fire, life and animation. My ideal is a girl who can ride like the wind, whose feet dance as she walks, whose eyes are all aglow with life and vitality, and there—I shouldn’t mind if she were a bit of a genius into the bargain!”
“A genius!” roared Repton, derisively. “What should a female genius want with you, Southerley?”
“Well, he’s welcome to her!” put in Bayre with contempt. “It’s the first time I ever heard a sane man say he admired that sort of thing in a woman! And I should think it would be the last! Intellect in a woman—intellect out of the common, I mean: of course I don’t mean that I admire a born fool—is an evil fungus, hideous and useless if not actually noxious in itself, and fatal, too, to the object upon which it has made its home.”
“Very poetical, but very absurd,” remarked Southerley. “The female genius you sneer at so loftily would be much more likely even to manage the house well than the sheep-woman you think so much of. And if she didn’t, at any rate she wouldn’t bore you to death as the other would.”