“I don’t, but I’d like to.”
“I wonder! However—I don’t mind telling you. It occurred to me rather forcibly how much simpler women’s problems were in those days. Two young people, isolated from the world, meet and spontaneously fall in love. They are creatures of instinct, and ignorant of any law except Might. A sleeping potion in the savage husband’s nightly horn settles that question, and they run away into the forest and are happy—would be happy forever more if let alone. But in these complicated days—all our obstacles are inside of us! Any one can find courage to defy the primitive and obvious —”
“Plenty of primitive people right in the midst of civilization,” interposed Tay, grimly.
“Yes, I know, and in your country divorce is easy. But for the highly civilized, life, even with divorce, is anything but easy. Women question that condition called happiness when it would appear to offer itself, examine it on all sides. They know men too well—life—above all, themselves. Or they have assumed impersonal duties and responsibilities. Or their brains have become so complex that love alone cannot satisfy. They would have love plus far more! If the choice must be made, they dare not cast for love, in their fear of disaster. Nothing is so dishonest as the so-called psychological novel, which leaves two thinking moderns in each other’s arms at the end of a forced situation, with their natures unchanged, all their problems—their inner problems—unsolved. They never can be solved by love, marriage, children, the good old way. The sort for whom all problems can be treated by the conventional recipe are not worth writing about. But it is a terrible proposition; for these highly civilized women have the automatic desires of their sex for love and happiness—intensified by imagination! But—they know that a greater need still is to fill their lives and use their brains.”
Tay had turned pale. “The modern man, unless he is an ass, gives his wife her head.”
“That is beside the question. The real trouble doesn’t sound particularly attractive when put into plain English: it is the raising of the ego to the nth power that makes these women want to stand alone, resent the idea of finding completion in a man.”
“Then let us pray that they will all die old maids, and their race die with them.”
“No hope! Children of the most commonplace parents are the products of their times. Heredity is modified from generation to generation. Otherwise, we should all be Siegmunds and Sieglindes. Their little brains are impregnated by forces seen and unseen. Hadji Sadrä would explain it by the theory of reincarnation, or by planetary conditions at birth—the only reasonable explanation of Shakespeare, by the way, if he wasn’t Bacon. But although, no doubt, many of the great do return to complete their work, there are not enough to go round. And there is a simpler explanation. In these vibrating days the very air is flashing and humming with secrets for those that have the magnet in their brains. Bright minds learn from life, not from their old-fashioned parents. Oh, the breed will increase, not diminish! Happiness, old style, is about done for. Women will be happier in consequence—or in another way. I don’t know about men. They have reigned too long. And then they are simple ingenuous creatures, the most tyrannical of them, and pathetically dependent upon women. Women are growing more independent every day, more indifferent to that sex ‘management’ of men, which so far has constituted a large part of man’s happiness.”
Tay was angry, therefore more jocular than ever. “Don’t forget the adaptability of even the male animal, also that man is born of woman; also brought up by her. I don’t worry one little bit about the future happiness of man. As for the Home—apartment-houses and the decline and fall of servants have about relegated it to the last stronghold of the old-fashioned love story—the country town. I said just now that I’d like to know all your thoughts. Well, I shouldn’t. My idea of happiness is a lifetime with a woman who would always be more or less of a mystery, who would have her own life—inner and outer—as I should have mine. And I’m not so sure that mine would be simple and ingenuous. Marriage with her would be a sort of intense personal partnership, with separations of irregular recurrence and length. Then, my lady, there would be a constant ache; passion would never wear itself out; and neither would be looking for novel affinities elsewhere.”
Julia smiled. “It sounds very enticing. But that isn’t the point. The subtlest enemy—it is that desire to find our highest completion alone.”