“I was quite prepared to find you entertaining views of that character,” remarked Miss Wallaby, with virginal severity. “Men who have wandered about the less advanced parts of the earth, and spent long periods of time in contact with inferior civilisations, quite generally do feel that way. Life in the Colonies, and in similar rude and remote regions, does produce that effect upon the masculine mind. But here in England, the nerve-centre of the English-speaking race, the point of concentration from which radiate all the impulses of refinement and culture that distinguish our generation, men are coming to see these matters in a different light. They no longer refuse to listen to the overwhelming arguments in favour of entire feminine equality——”
“Oh, I admit that at once,” broke in Uncle Dudley. “But do women nowadays believe in equality among themselves? In my youth they used to devote pretty well all their energies to showing how much superior they were to other women.”
“I spoke of the masculine attitude,” said Miss Wallaby, coldly. “Viewed intelligently, the gradations and classifications which we maintain among ourselves, at the cost of such infinite trouble and personal self-sacrifice, are the very foundation upon which rests the superstructure of British Society.”
“I admit that, too,” Uncle Dudley hastened to put in. “Really, we are getting on very nicely.”
Miss Wallaby ignored the interruption altogether. “The point is,” she went on, “that the male mind in England is coming—with characteristic slowness, no doubt, but still coming—to recognise the necessity of securing the very fullest and most complete participation of my sex in public affairs. As the diffusion of enlightenment progresses, men will more and more abandon the coarse and egoistic standards of their days of domination by brute force, and turn instead to the ideals of purity and sweetness which Woman in Politics typifies. It has been observed that one may pick out the future rulers of England in each coming generation by scanning the honour-lists of Oxford and Cambridge. How happy a day it will be for England, and civilisation, when this is said of Girton and Newnham as well!”
“I spent a summer in the State of Maine once, some years ago,” said Uncle Dudley. “That’s the State, you know, where they’ve had a Prohibition law now for nearly forty years. The excess of females over males is larger there, I believe, than it is anywhere else in the world—owing to the fact that all the young men who are worth their salt emigrate to some other State as soon as they’ve saved up enough for a railway-ticket. The men that you do see lounging around there, in the small villages, are all minding the baby, or sitting on the doorstep shelling peas, or out in the backyard, with their mouths full of clothes-pins, hanging up sheets and pillow-cases on the line to dry. The women there take a very active part in politics—and every census shows that Maine’s population has diminished. Shipbuilding has almost ceased, farms are being abandoned yearly, the State is mortgaged up to its eyebrows, and you get nothing but fried clams and huckleberry-pie for breakfast—but, of course, I suppose there is a good deal of purity and sweetness.”
Miss Wallaby rose and walked away from us; the black velvet riband around her neck, the glint of gas-light on her eyeglasses, the wearied haughtiness on her swarthy, high-nosed face, seemed to unite in saying to us that we were very poor creatures indeed.
“She’s been down to the Retired Licensed Victuallers’ Division of Surrey, you know,” exclaimed Uncle Dudley, “making speeches in favour of the sitting Member, old Sir Watkyn Hump.”
“Ah, that accounts for the milk in the cocoa-nut,” I remarked.
“Well, no,” my friend mused aloud, “I fancy young Hump accounts for that. See—she’s gone and cut him out from under the Timby-Hucks’s guns.”