“But we have the vote now?” said Christina Alberta almost flippantly. “Why is a woman’s life sacrifice?”
“Think of the children we bear,” said Miss Lambone in a constrained voice.
“Well!” said Christina Alberta, and suppressed some scandalous remark.
“The most astonishing thing about us,” she broke out again, after a pause; “the most astonishing thing in the feminine make-up is that hardly any of us do seem to want children. A lot of us anyhow don’t. Now that I am beginning to learn something about biology, I realize how marvellous that is. As a race of creatures specialized for children, we ought to be eaten up by the desire for children. As a matter of fact most modern women will do anything to avoid having children. We dread them. To me they seem like a swarm of hidden dwarfs, prepared to come upon me and eat up my whole existence. It’s not simply I don’t want them; I live in fear of them. Love we may want. Many of us do. Intensely. We want to love and be loved—to get close and near to some one. It’s a delusion I suppose. One of Nature’s clumsy tricks. It is all a delusion. He vanishes—he was never there. Under the old conditions it availed; it got the children Nature wanted. But we don’t think of children. We don’t want to think about them. There it is! And anyway children do not take a woman out of her egotism; they only extend and intensify it. I have known intelligent girls marry and have children, and when the baby appeared their minds evaporated. They became creatures of instinct, messing about with napkins. I could scream at the thought of it. No, I am an egoist pure and simple. I am Christina Alberta, and her only. I am not Sargon. I refuse altogether to mix with that promiscuous anybody-nobody.”
“After all that may only be a phase in your development,” said Devizes.
“It is the only one I know.”
“That is evident. But I assure you, Christina Alberta, that this revolt and distress of yours is a phase. You are talking rebellion and egoism and anarchism as a healthy baby screams to get breath into its lungs, and escape from the stuffiness of old air. The baby doesn’t know why it screams and no doubt finds some dim little grievance in its brain——”
“Go on,” said Christina Alberta. “Chastise me and chastise me.”
It seemed to Bobby that there were tears in her voice.
“No, but you are so young, my dear,” said Devizes.