She was much impressed with them, for she had never met important people before, and she was given to understand that they were very important. They seemed to have their fingers on innumerable reforms which were only suppressed by the stupidity of the Government. Directly the Government was removed, as of course such idiots soon would be, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell would raise their fingers and, hey presto! women would have votes, the slums would be pulled down, maternity would be endowed, prostitutes would be saved, prisons would be reformed, capital punishment abolished, the working classes would be properly housed, every able-bodied man who wished it should have his small holding, the railways would be nationalized, site values would be taxed, divorce would be made easy and free from social taint, and education would be made scientific and thorough. In the meantime, as the Government did not budge, Mr. Mitchell went to the Cocos Islands and Constantinople to procure evidence of horrors abroad and Mrs. Mitchell addressed meetings on the subject of horrors at home.
Morrison was impressed. The contrast between these people who thought of everything and everybody but themselves and her own home, where nothing was thought of but the family, the Church, and the Empire, shocked her into thinking and gave her a sense of liberation. It made human beings more interesting than she had thought, and she began to see that they did not, as she had heedlessly accepted that they did, fit infallibly into their places, and that vast numbers had no places to fit into. She herself, she saw, did not fit into any place, and that she had been squeezed, like paint out of a tube, out of her home for no other reason than that she was a woman, and there was only just enough money to establish the boys. However, she could not quite swallow Mrs. Mitchell’s view that men had deliberately, coldly, and of set purpose ousted women from their rightful share in the sweets of life.
She had a period of despair as these revelations sank into her mind and she had to digest Mrs. Mitchell’s awful facts and statistics about the night-life of London. Life seemed too terrible for her powers, but, as she soon began to see how comic Mrs. Mitchell was, she pulled herself together and found that she was strengthened by the experience, and when Mitchell confessed the awful doings of his past, she felt immeasurably older than he, and was thankful she was a woman and did not expect such things of herself. For she could never quite take his word for all he said. She knew her brothers too well to accept his plea of passionate necessity.
“Gawd!” he used to say. “When I think of my past I feel that I must go on my knees and worship your purity.”
His absurdity made her blush, but she liked him. He was clever and had read much under his father’s guidance, poetry and modern English fiction mostly, and when she went to tea with him in his studio he used to read aloud to her, Keats and Shelley and Matthew Arnold.
“I think I only like poetry,” she said once, “when it makes pictures. When it doesn’t do that it seems to me just words, and it doesn’t seem to matter how nice they sound.”
“Gawd!” he said. “That’s like Kühler. He says nothing makes such pictures as the Bible, and he is always quoting that about: ‘At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: where he fell, there he lay down.’ And he says it must be the words, because his own Hebrew Bible never gave him anything like the same—er—vision of it.”
Once he had begun to talk of Mendel she would not let him leave the subject.
“Do you think he’s a genius?” she would ask.