“Oh, it would be too long a story,” she half protested. “But to put it briefly, this is my idea. Emanuel seems to me to be a magnificent character, with one extraordinary limitation. I think it must be a Jewish limitation—for I have seen it pointed out that they do not invent things. That is Emanuel’s flaw; he has not an original thought in his head. He merely carries to a mathematical point of expansion and development the ready-made ideas which he finds accepted all about him. What you see in him is a triumph of the Semitic passion for working a problem out to its ultimate conclusion. When you consider it, what has he done? Merely discovered, by tremendous labor and energy, the smoothest possible working arrangement of the social system which his class regards as best for itself, and hence for all mankind—the system which exalts a chosen few, and keeps all the rest in subjection. My dear sir, things do not rise higher than their source! How did the Torrs come by their estates? By stealing the birthright of thousands of dumb human beasts of burden, and riveting the family collar round their necks with no more regard for their wishes or their rights than as if they had been so many puppies or colts. And what was the origin of the Ascarel fortune? The most frightful and bloodstained human slavery in the poisonous jungles of the Dutch East Indies—that, and an ancient family business of international usury, every dirty penny in which if you followed it far enough, meant the flaying alive of a peasant, or the starvation of his little children. These are the things which your cousin inherits. He is fine enough to be ashamed of them, but he is not broad enough to repudiate them. He makes himself believe that they were wrong only in degree. He will admit that the Torrs were too brutal toward their serfs, the Ascarels too selfish with their millions. That is all. And he sets himself to proving that with the right kind of chief at their head these systems of theirs can be made not only respectable, but even profitable to the slaves as well as the master. He does not see that the systems themselves are crimes! ”
“Yes, I am glad that I came to you,” said Christian, in low, earnest tones, in the pause which followed. The girl, breathing deeply under the fervor of her mood, looked fixedly before her toward the copper-haze above Paul’s dome. He watched the noble immobility of her profile and thrilled at its suggestion of strength.
“To do him justice,” she went on, musingly, “he does not pretend that it is progress. He is honest, and he describes it as reaction—a long step backward. It is just that kind of honesty and devotion, plus wrong-headedness, which keeps us all at sixes and sevens. If we agree that there is no better-intentioned man alive than Emanuel—still he would do more harm than the most atrocious blackguard, if he had his way with the world. But fortunately, he will not have it. A vastly greater and loftier Jew has said that you cannot pour new wine into old bottles.”
They walked on for a little in silence. “Have you been to Emanuel’s place then?” Christian asked at last.
“No; I know it only from hearsay, and from his books. A woman novelist for whom I do work has been there, and she has told me a good deal about it. She is going to use it in a book, and would you believe it? she is crazy with enthusiasm about the whole thing. I tried to point out to her what she was doing, but you might as well talk to the east wind. The way women run after the hand that smites them, and beslaver it with kisses—that is the thing that enrages me most of all. Why, the very corner-stone of Emanuel’s System is the perpetual enslavement of women. I am always surprised, when I hear about his mediæval arrangements, that he hasn’t set up a ducking-stool for his women-folk. I’m sure it’s a pure oversight on his part. Well, what are you to expect when cultivated women like Mrs. Sessyl-Trant turn up as frantic admirers of that sort of thing? However, thank goodness, women are not forever to be sold out by the fools of their own sex. It is impossible not to see that the tide has turned at last. There is a change—and I think something genuine and lasting is going to come out of it. I really think it!”
“Ah, that is what I feel,” put in Christian, with confused eagerness. “I have no clear thoughts about it, but it is my deep feeling that—that—what shall I say?—we are most at fault in the matter of the women.”
Frances pursued her thought, in frowning meditation. “It is the new professional class, who earn their own living, who will help us out. These women, who have come through the mill of self-responsibility, will not accept the old nonsense invented for them, and imposed upon them by the women parasites. The younger women who take care of themselves have all begun to ask questions: ‘Why should I do this?’ ‘Why shouldn’t I do that?’ ‘And whose business but my own is it if I do the other?’ Unfortunately, they are too ready to accept the first answer that comes to them. Oh, that is the woeful trouble! Men have slowly built up for themselves a good deal of machinery by which they can find out what is true. I don’t say they are not continually deceived, or that they invariably recognize the truth when they see it, but still they have certain facilities for protecting themselves against falsehoods. But women have practically none at all. They are systematically lied to from their cradle to their grave. They read so hard!—they are the consumers of novels, religious books, weekly newspapers, magazines, and the rest of it—but never a word of actual truth is allowed to reach them out of it all. Wherever they turn to inquire about themselves, about their rights and their duties in this world that they have been born into, they encounter this vast, unbroken conspiracy of liars. That is the gravest of all the disadvantages they labor under. Why, take even the ‘New Woman’ fiction of a few years ago. There was a great hullabaloo raised over certain novels; at last, they cried, the truth was being-revealed by women, for women, of women. But what nonsense! It turned out not to be the truth at all, but only the old falsehood, disguised in hysterics and some shocking bad manners. There seems no escape for women anywhere. They are lied to by their parents, their parsons, their doctors, their authors—and of course they lie to one another. They have a whole debased currency of insincerities and flattering falsehoods which they pass among themselves, keeping straight faces all the while as if it were honest money.—But as I said, I think a change is coming. However, don’t let’s talk any more about it. I get too angry!”
“I like you to be angry—only not with me,” commented Christian with a sprightly smile. Then he added, more gravely, “Oh, I can see how the women who work will make a change. It was very curious to me to see those girls at the machines in your office. It was one of them who let me in, before you came. She was quite different from any of the English women I have been meeting. One saw that she had thoughts of her own—an atmosphere of her own. I should not like to tell lies to her; I think she would detect them more rapidly than I could get them out.”
“Oh, Connie,” laughed Frances. “Yes, she has a head on her shoulders. They are all fairly bright girls, and they get on together extremely well. It’s quite their own idea to divide up the work equally among the lot, and when there is not much doing to take turns in working alternate days. I think it was rather fine of them.”
“Ah, that is the class of women one would like to help,” he declared. “That is what I will devote myself to.”