“You, dear Evie,” he looked at me with a fond indulgent smile. “You have plenty of work and it’s always well done—to bring romance and sweetness into life.”
There is something quite maddening about Roger when he talks this way. I could find it in me to call him an ass. All the superiority of countless generations of men who have ordered women’s lives lies behind it. And he is impregnable, shut up with his idea. It is built round him and cemented with a thousand years of prejudice and tradition.
“I don’t want to bring romance and sweetness into life,” I said crossly, “I want to get something out of it.”
“You can’t help it. It’s what you were put in the world for. We men don’t want you in the struggle. That’s for us. It’s our business to go down into the arena and fight for you, make a place for you, keep you out of it all.”— He moved his foot across the register and turned it off.
“You’ve turned off the heat,” I cried.
He turned it on.
—“Keep you out of it all. Sheltered from the noise and glare of the world by our own firesides.”
“Some of us would rather have a little more noise and glare by our own register.”
“All wrong, Evie, all wrong. You’re in a niche up there with a lamp burning before it. If you come down from your niche you’re going to lose the thing that’s made you worshipful—your femininity, your charm.”
“What does our charm matter to us? What good is our femininity to us?”