“Make the best of it!” he interrupted indignantly. “What an expression to use! It would not only be your duty, dear, but your privilege!”
“Wait a moment, Edmund. If you were a shopman earning fifteen shillings a week, and working from early morning to late at night, should you think it not only your duty but your privilege?”
He made a wrathful gesture.
“What comparison is there? I should be earning a hard livelihood by slaving for other people. But a married woman who works in her own home, for her husband’s children—”
“Work is work, and when a woman is overburdened with it she must find it difficult not to weary of home and husband and children all together. But of course I don’t mean to say that my work is too hard. All I mean is, that I don’t see why any one should make work, and why life shouldn’t be as full of enjoyment as possible.”
“Monica, you have got these ideas from those people at Chelsea. That is exactly why I don’t care for you to see much of them. I utterly disapprove of—”
“But you are mistaken. Miss Barfoot and Miss Nunn are all for work. They take life as seriously as you do.”
“Work? What kind of work? They want to make women unwomanly, to make them unfit for the only duties women ought to perform. You know very well my opinions about that kind of thing.”
He was trembling with the endeavour to control himself, to speak indulgently.
“I don’t think, Edmund, there’s much real difference between men and women. That is, there wouldn’t be, if women had fair treatment.”