An outbreak of applause, and then dead silence. The ticking of the clock became audible. Some external force took hold upon him, lifted him from the chair, and impelled him a few steps forward. Some voice, decidedly not his own, though it appeared to issue from his throat, uttered the words "Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen." And before the sound had ceased, there flashed into his thoughts a story concerning an enlightened young lady of Stockholm, who gave a lecture to advance the theory that woman's intellect suffered from the habit of allowing her hair to grow so long. It was years since this trifle had recurred to his mind; it came he knew not how, and he clutched at it like the drowning man at a straw. Before he really understood what he was about, he had begun to narrate the anecdote, and suddenly, to his astonishment, he was rewarded with universal peals of laughter. The noise dispelled his anguish of nervousness; he drew a deep breath, grasped the table before him, and was able to speak as freely as if he had been on his own hearth-rug in Clement's Inn.
Make a popular audience laugh, and you have a hold upon its attention. Able now to distinguish the faces that were gazing at him, Denzil perceived that he had begun with a lucky stroke; the people were in expectation of more merriment, and sat beaming with good-humour. He saw the Mayor spread himself and stroke his beard, and the Mayoress simper as she caught a friend's eye. Now he might venture to change his tone and become serious.
Decidedly, his views were moderate. From the beginning he allowed it to be understood that, whatever might be the effect of long hair, he for one considered it becoming, and was by no means in favour of reducing it to the male type. The young lady of Stockholm might or might not have been indebted for her wider mental scope to the practice of curtailing her locks, yet he had known many Swedish ladies (and ladies of England, too) who, in spite of lovely hair, managed to preserve an exquisite sense of the distinctions of womanhood, and this (advanced opinion notwithstanding) he maintained was the principal thing. But, the fact that so many women were nowadays lifting up their voices in a demand for various degrees of emancipation seemed to show that the long tresses and the flowing garb had really, by process of civilization, come to symbolize certain traditions of inferiority which weighed upon the general female consciousness. "Let us, then, ask what these traditions are, and what is to be said for or against them from the standpoint of a liberal age."
Denzil no longer looked with horror at the face of the clock; his only fear was lest the hands should move too rapidly, and forbid him to utter in spacious periods all he had on his mind. By half-past eight he was in the midst of a vehement plea for an enlargement of female education, in the course of which he uttered several things rather disturbing to the nerves of Mrs. Mumbray, and other ladies present.—Woman, it was true, lived an imperfect life if she did not become wife and mother; but this truism had been insisted on to the exclusion of another verity quite as important: that wifehood and motherhood, among civilized people, implied qualifications beyond the physical. The ordinary girl was sent forth into life with a mind scarcely more developed than that of a child. Hence those monstrous errors she constantly committed when called upon to accept a husband. Not one marriage in fifty thousand was an alliance on terms fair to the woman. In the vast majority of cases, she wedded a sort of man in the moon. Of him and of his world she knew nothing; whereas the bridegroom had almost always a very sufficient acquaintance with the circumstances, habits, antecedents, characteristics, of the girl he espoused. Her parents, her guardians, should assure themselves—pooh! even if these people were conscientious and capable, the task was in most cases beyond their power.
"I have no scheme for rendering marriages universally happy. On the contrary, I believe that marriages in general will always serve as a test of human patience." (Outbreak of masculine laughter.) "But assuredly it is possible, by judicious training of young girls, to guard them against some of the worst perils which now threaten their going forth into the world. It is possible to put them on something like an equality in knowledge of life with the young men of corresponding social station." ("Oh, shameful!" murmured Mrs. Mumbray. "Shocking!") "They must be treated, not like ornaments under glass-cases, but like human beings who, physiologists assure us, are born with mental apparatus, even as men are. I repeat that I don't want to see them trained for politics" (many faces turned towards the middle of the hall) "and that I lament the necessity imposed on so many of them of struggling with men in the labour-market. What I demand is an education in the true sense of the word, and that as much at the hands of their mothers as of the school-teacher. When that custom has been established, be sure that it will affect enormously the habits and views of the male population. The mass of men at present regard women as creatures hoodwinked for them by nature—or at all events by society. When they can no longer act on that assumption, interest and, let us hope, an expanding sense of honour will lead them to see the marriage contract, and all connected with it, in altogether a different light."
He drank off a glass of water, listening the while to resonant applause. There was still twenty minutes, and he decided to use the time in offering solace to the army of women who, by force of mere statistics, are fated to the frustration of their raison d'etre. On this subject he had nothing very remarkable to say, and, indeed, the maiden ladies who heard him must have felt that it all amounted to a pitying shrug of the shoulders. But he could not speak otherwise than vigorously, and at times his words were eloquent.
"We know not how things may improve in the future," (thus he perorated), "but let celibate ladies of the present bear in mind that the chances are enormously against their making a marriage worthy of the name." ("Oh!" from some man at the back.) "Let them remember, too, if they are disposed to altruism, that though most men manage to find a wife, very few indeed, as things are, do not ultimately wish that they had remained single." (A roar of laughter, and many protests.) "This being so, let women who have no family of their own devote themselves, whenever possible, to the generous and high task of training the new female generation, so that they may help to mitigate one of the greatest ills of civilized existence, and prepare for women of the future the possibility of a life truly emancipated."
Denzil sat down with a glow of exulting triumph. His lecture was a success, not a doubt of it. He saw the chairman rise, and heard slow, languid phrases which contrasted strangely with his own fire and rush. A vote of thanks was being proposed. When silence came, he was aware of some fluster in the body of the hall; people were whispering, tittering, turning round to look. Two persons had stood up with the intention of seconding the vote of gratitude; one was Mr. Chown, the other that lady who had a place in the middle of the assemblage, and who seemed to be so well known. The Radical draper did not immediately give way, but his neighbours reminded him of propriety. Quarrier had just scrutinized the person of the lady about to speak, when her voice fell upon his ears with a pleasant distinctness.
"As it is certainly right," she began, "that a woman should be one of those who return thanks to our lecturer, and as I fear that no other woman present will be inclined to undertake this duty, I will make no apology for trying to perform it. And that in very few words. Speaking for myself, I cannot pretend to agree with the whole of Mr. Quarrier's address; I think his views were frequently timid"—laughter and hushing—"frequently timid, and occasionally quite too masculine. I heard once of a lady who proposed to give a series of lectures on 'Astronomy from a Female Point of View'" (a laugh from two or three people only), "and I should prefer to entitle Mr. Quarrier's lecture, 'Woman from a Male Point of View.' However, it was certainly well-meaning, undoubtedly eloquent, and on the whole, in this time of small mercies, something for which a member of the struggling sex may reasonably be grateful. I wish, therefore, to add my voice to the proposal that a vote of thanks be offered to our lecturer, with all sincerity and all heartiness."
"A devilish good little speech!" Denzil murmured to himself, as the applause and merriment broke forth.