But to come to your letter. You say that I picture the world to you, the world of men and women, as a place full of ravening beasts of prey, and you add that now whenever two or three men are fluffing round you, you will feel like a defenceless pigeon surrounded by hungry hawks. Well, if my letter has done that for you it must have wrought a transformation indeed. I have seen you more than once with two or three young men fluffing (I like that word fluffing, it is apt; keep it for future use) round you and somehow it never struck me that they in the faintest degree resembled hawks or that there was anything of the silly pigeon about my daughter. They generally, I seem to remember, looked nervous and rather scared, though genuinely anxious to please, very unhawk like; but then they were young, and I dare say a callow hawk is pretty well as timid as a newly hatched chick. Courage comes with age, with the hardening of the beak and the sharpening of the talons.
Yet I am not altogether sorry if my last letter brought to you some realisation of some part of the truth; one aspect of it, let us say. Looked at from one point of view, the world of men and women is full of ravening beasts of prey. But take up another standpoint and you will see that the powers and opportunities of the beasts are often pretty narrowly limited. Limited sometimes by their own ignorance of their own powers, limited always by the social institutions which they themselves have established. It seems rum, but the wolf has filed his own fangs, the hawk has clipped his own claws.
You may be a pigeon, Alexa, but, thanks to many things, you are not a defenceless pigeon. You are defended, for instance, by your own brains, by the knowledge which I have taken good care should be yours, by the customs of the social circle in which you were born, by the institution of marriage, and most of all by the jealousy and suspicion the wolves and hawks have of one another. So on the whole you are tolerably safe, my birdie; you need not flutter a feather. Remember what I once told you in another letter when I was employing a slightly different set of metaphors—it is always the traitor in the citadel who gives the fortress away.
“If men don’t really love women, women as a sex, as distinguished from their own particular women,” you ask, “why is it that they protect them to such an extent, to such a so often unnecessary and troublesome extent? Why do they always rescue them first in shipwrecks and fires, and so on?”
Curiously enough, that was almost exactly the question your friend Stella put to me only yesterday when she called here at tea time and everybody but I was out.
By the way, what a ferociously advanced young woman Stella is becoming! She quite scared me now and then. I never felt at all sure what she was going to say next. She was in a great rage with one of her young men cousins who had taken her to the theatre the night before, or the night before that. I forget for the moment what the play was, but it doesn’t matter. She liked it and was intensely interested in it, but the young man violently disapproved of it—disapproved of it for her, that is. Half way through the second act he insisted on her leaving the theatre there and then. Stella made a fight of it, but she couldn’t make a scene, and so she caved in, and now she swears she will never speak to him again.
The reason he gave her was that he could not bear the idea of his cousin (“his cousin,” you should have heard Stella emphasise the possessive) listening to such a grossly improper thing as that. Stella’s very pretty face wrinkled with wrath when she told me. “His cousin,” she repeated. “As though I were his property. But that’s always the way with men. The man’s point of view! How I hate it! They can’t bear that anything of which they disapprove should come near any woman connected with them. They don’t mind about the others.”
And so, quite against my own will, I was compelled—the while I soothed her with chocolates—to defend, or rather to explain (it comes to the same thing) the Man’s Point of View. My explanation will go some way to answering you.
Stella was right in one thing. She put her finger—what beautiful hands the girl has, by the way, did you ever notice them?—directly on the spot. It is the sense of proprietorship that does it. Men do not love women as women, but they do love, or at any rate have some sort of feeling which serves the purpose of love, their own women kind, the women “connected with them.” There is nothing a bit noble in it to begin with, it is just sheer egoism; the same sort of feeling that makes a child before it can talk hold on tight to a toy that you try to take away from it. I remember you, when you were in your cradle, punched me with one fist while you clung on with the other to a woolly red ball that you would cram into your mouth. Well, just so, but more effectively would I punch a man who tried to take you away from me. And at the root the motive for the punching would be the same. So, Alexa, unless the man be quite of the right sort let him look to himself, for I still keep my punching muscles in trim.
No, in this sense of ownership there is nothing noble, nothing magnificent, nothing to swagger about. But just as a very lovely and exquisite flower may have a very dirty and ugly root, so from this sense of ownership has grown the fine flower of chivalry and the less fine and flowerlike but, for work-a-day purposes, the much more useful plant of men’s protective attitude to all women, or, not to exaggerate, to a good many women.