“No, seriously,” urged Vestalia; “don’t you agree with me that women should be just as self-reliant and independent as men?”
“Me? I agree absolutely. I would have women insist upon the most unflinching independence, all the world over. I feel so keenly on that point, that out of the entire sex I would make only one exception. Very few people would take such an advanced position as that, I imagine. Just fancy how far I go! There are hundreds of millions of women, and I would have them all independent but just one. By a curious accident it happens that you are that one—but you will be fair-minded enough to recognise, I feel convinced, that this is the merest chance.”
She made a droll little mouth at him, and he went on:
“Yes, it is very strange. I cannot pretend to account for it, but you do undoubtedly form an exception to what would otherwise be a universal rule. The thought of other women earning their own living fills me with joy. I am fascinated by it, I assure you. I feel like bursting into song at the barest suggestion of the idea. But this very excess of reverence for the general principle begets a corresponding vehemence of feeling about the one solitary exception. That is in accordance with a natural law. Surely you respect natural laws? Well, the vaguest adumbration of an idea of your doing things for yourself convulses me with rage. The notion that my right to take entire charge of you is disputed seems monstrous and abominable to me. It is a denial of my mission on earth, and I am bound to combat it with all my powers.”
Vestalia smiled. “I see what you mean. You are just an old prehistoric savage like the rest of your sex. Your one idea is to drag a woman off into your cave and keep her there, with a big rock rolled up in front of the door when you’re away.”
“I would not have you disparage the primitive instincts,” urged Mosscrop, with an air of solemnity. “My word for it, we should be an extraordinarily uninteresting lot without them. They are the abiding bone and flesh and muscle of humanity, upon which it pleases each foolish generation in turn to stretch its own thin, trivial pelt of fashionable convention. My desire to seize you, and drag you off to my own cave, and make a life’s business of keeping you there, always beautiful, always happy, always replenishing the well-spring of joy in my existence—you choose that as something typical of the primeval man surviving within me. Let me tell you, sweet little Vestalia, that the human mind would cease tomorrow from its eternal wistful dream of progress if it were not for the hope that advancing civilisation will bring improved facilities for that sort of thing. The world would wilt, and curl up like a sapless leaf, and drop from its solar stem into gaseous space, if that anticipation were taken away. The race keeps itself going only by cherishing the faith that sometime, somewhere in the golden future, this planet will be arranged so that the right woman will always get into the right cave. That is what people mean when they speak of the millennium.”
“That is all very well,” said Vestalia, “but it deals with everything from the man’s point of view. Consider the other side of the case. What do you say to the woman’s disinclination for cave-life—is that not entitled to respect?”
“Possibly,” answered David, reflectively—“if one were able to believe in it.”
The waiter entered at this point with a burdened tray in his arms, and Vestalia took up the wine list. “Which is it that we had—that in the lovely high green bottles, with arms like a vase?” she asked Mosscrop. “We must have the same again.”
“You have told me nothing as yet,” said David, reproachfully, when they were alone again, “of all the thousand things I long to know.”