Once a fortnight Robert engaged Old Mole to play golf with him, and he consented because he desired to give Matilda as full a liberty as she could desire. In the alternate weeks Robert came to stay for two nights and occupied his room next to Old Mole’s. He would take them out to dinner and the theater, and after it the brothers would sit up yarning until the small hours, and always the discussion would begin by Robert saying:
“ ’Pon my honor, women are extraordinary!” And then, completely to his own satisfaction, he would produce those generalizations which, in England, pass for a knowledge of human nature, and Old Mole would recognize them as old companions of his own. They were too absurd for anger, but Robert’s persistence would annoy him, and he would say:
“When you live with a woman you are continually astonished to find that she is a human being.”
“Human,” answered Robert, sweetening the sentiment with a sip of port, “with something of the angel.”
“Angel be damned,” came in explosive protest, “women are just as human as ourselves, and rather more so.”
“Ah!” said Robert, with blissful inconsequence, “but it doesn’t do to let ’em know it.”
Robert’s contemptuous sentimentalization of women so bothered Old Mole that he sought to probe for its sources. Among the books in the chambers were many modern English novels, and he found nearly all of them, in varying formulæ, dealing axiomatically with woman as an extraneous animal unaccountably attached to the species, a creature fearfully and wonderfully ignorant of the affairs of the world, of her own physical processes, of the most elementary rules of health, morality, and social existence, capricious, soulless, unscrupulous, scheming, intriguing, concerned wholly and solely with marriage, if she were a “good” woman, with the destruction of marriage if she were “bad”; at best being a sort of fairy—(Robert’s “angel”)—whose function and destiny were to pop the sugarplum of love into the mouths of virtuous men. The most extreme variant of this conception was to be found in the works of Robert Wherry, who, in a syrupy medium, depicted women as virginal mothers controlling and comforting a world of conceited, helpless little boys. Wherry was enormously successful, and he had many imitators, but none of them had his supreme audacity or his canny belief in the falsehood which was his only stock in trade. The trait of Wherry was upon all the novels in Robert’s collection. Even among the “advanced” novels the marks of the beast were there. They advanced not by considering life, but by protest against Wherry. They said, in effect, “Woman is not a mother, she is a huntress of men, or a social worker, or a mistress—(the conscious audacity in using that word!)—or a parasite, or a tyrant”; and one bold fellow said, “She has breasts”; he said it not once, but on every fifth page in every book. Old Mole found him even more disgusting than Wherry, who at least, in his dexterity, might be supposed to give pleasure to young girls and foolish, inexperienced persons of middle age—(like Robert)—and no great harm be done.
To protect himself against the uncleanness of these books he took down “Rabelais,” which Robert kept tucked away on his highest shelf. And when he had driven off the torpor in his blood and thoughts induced by the slavishness of Robert’s modern literature, he told himself that it was folly to take it seriously:
“There have always been bad books,” he said. “The good survive in the love of good readers. Good taste is always the same, but vicious taste is blown away by the cleansing winds of the soul.”