Christina Alberta's father

by H. G. Wells

That resolution not to marry seemed after all just a part of her immense modernity. Because of all this group of “new people” in which he found her, she seemed to Bobby to be in every way the newest. She was the boldest enterprise in living he had ever met. Her flare of hungry rebel individuality fascinated him. Where in this world was she going? Would she win out to this free personal life she desired or would she fail to find an objective of work and come upon disappointment and solitude like some creature that has strayed? The world had terrified Bobby in his own person greatly; it terrified him still more when he thought of this valiant little figure going out to challenge it.

Bobby was naturally, inherently, afraid; his instinct was for security, protection, kindliness and help. He clung to his “Aunt Suzannah” job for safety. He didn’t believe Christina Alberta knew one tenth of the dangers she ran of insult, defeat, humiliation, neglect, repulse, fatigue and lonely distress. His imagination presented a tormenting picture of her away there in dark, confused, immense and blundering London, as an excessively fragile figure, light on its feet, shock-head erect, arms akimbo, unaware of monstrous ambushed dangers. Now that he began to understand her, he began to understand a great number of bright-eyed, adventurous, difficult young women he had met in the last few years, and he had his first dim realization of the meaning of the deep wide stir among womankind that had won them votes and a score of unprecedented freedoms.

Many of these younger women were doing their work and holding their own exactly like men. They were painting and drawing like men, writing criticism like men, writing plays and novels like men, leading movements, doing scientific work, playing a part in politics. Like men? On reflection—not exactly. No. They still kept different. But they didn’t do their things in any fashion one could call womanly. Without adding strange new meanings to “womanly.” The novels they were writing interested him immensely. People like Stella Benson wrote books like—anybody; you could not tell from her work whether she was a man or a woman. All that again was new. George Eliot perhaps was a precursor. Perhaps. The former sort of women’s writings, when they were not “pretty me” books, were “kindly auntie” books; you heard the petticoats swish in every page.

Sexless, these new ones? Bobby weighed the word. The earlier generation of women who wanted to be emancipated suppressed sex, suppressed it so fiercely that its negative presence became the dominant factor in their lives. They ceased to be positive woman; they became fantastically negative woman. But this newer multitude was not so much repressing as forgetting their sex, making little of it. Christina Alberta had in a way made nothing of her sex, not by struggling against it, but by making it cheap for herself as a man makes it cheap for himself—so that it was a thing of mere intermittent moods and impulses for her—and she could go on to other things.

Going on to other things. His imagination recurred to that little figure resolved to conquer the world for itself in defiance of every tradition.

There was a strong urgency in him to start off to London in pursuit of her, to hover about her, intervene, protect her and carry her off to security. He knew she wouldn’t permit that sort of thing to happen anyhow. He’d have to be just a friend and companion to her, be at hand for her, and if she did encounter some disaster, stand by her.

It was a queer thing that he should want to stand by this unsexed young woman. It was just what one would not expect; it was part, perhaps, of the immense biological changes of the time. In the past the species had needed half the race specialized for child-bearing and child-rearing; now plainly it didn’t. The tremendous and worshipful dignity of wife and mother was not for all women any longer. That would remain for a certain sort of them to take up if they would. But a vast multitude of women were born now to miss that. Some would become pretty nuisances who would presently cease to be pretty, parasites on love and the respect for motherhood; shams, simulacra. Others would break away to a real individual life—a third sex. Perhaps in the new world there would cease to be two sexes only; there would be recognized varieties and subdivisions. So Bobby speculated. For just as there were women who did not want to bear children, so there were men who did not want to lord it over wife and children.

They would want to love all the same. Every individual of a social species needed love; to fail in that need was to escape out of social life to lonely futility. “Mutual comfort,” Bobby quoted. In his past Bobby had dreamt of the love of children. Even now he remembered as a fact that he had dreamt particularly of a little girl of his own that he could protect and explore. But now the thought and interest of Christina Alberta had blotted that out. It was extraordinary to him to perceive how possessed he was by her. He could endure no prospect of life just now unless it was to include Christina Alberta as its principal fact. But he’d be no use to her unless she respected him. He couldn’t hope to stand subordinate to her, any more than he could hope to be her master. In the latter case she’d rebel; in the former, she’d despise. They would have to stand side by side. And since she was clever, able and resolved to work hard and distinguish herself, he must word hard and also distinguish himself too. He had to be her equal and remain and keep himself her equal....

That, in fact, was why he was going to write a great novel—not just a novel but a great one.

He looked again at the neatly written page. “Ups and Downs,” he read. “A Pedestrian Novel.”