“Dangerous,” Honey interpolated.
“Unwomanly,” Pete added.
“Immodest,” Billy concluded.
“Well, thank God it’s all over,” Ralph went on. “But, as I say, I give up guessing what’s changed her, unless it’s the principle that constant dropping wears away the stone. Oscar Wilde had the answer. They’re sphinxes without secrets. They do anything that occurs to them and for no particular reason. I get along with, them only by laying down the law and holding them to it. And I reckon they’ve got that idea firmly fixed in their minds now—that they’re to stay where we put them.”
Honey wriggled as if in discomfort. “Seems to me, Ralph, you take a pretty cold-blooded view of the situation. I guess I don’t go very far with you. Not that I pretend to understand women. I don’t. My system with them is to give them anything they ask, within reason, of course, to keep them busy and happy, buy them presents, soft-soap them, jolly them along. I suppose that personally, I wouldn’t have minded their flying a little every afternoon, as long as they took the proper care. I mean by that, not to fly too far out to sea or too high in the air and never when we were at home, so long, in short, as they followed the rules that we laid down for them. You fellows seem to have the idea if we let them do that we’d lose them. But if there’s one general proposition fixed more firmly in my nut than any other, it is that you can’t lose them. But of course I intend always to stand by whatever you-all say.”
“I don’t know,” Billy burst in hotly, “which of you two makes me sickest and which is the most insulting in his attitude towards women, you, Ralph, who treat them as if they were household pets, or you, Honey, who treat them as if they were dolls. In my opinion there is only one law to govern a man’s relation with a woman—the law of chivalry. To love her, and cherish her, to do all the hard work of the world for her, to stand between her and everything that is unbeautiful and unpleasant, to think for her, to put her on a pedestal and worship her; to my mind that sums up the whole duty of man to woman.”
“They’re better than goddesses on pedestals,” Pete said. “They’re creatures neither of flesh nor of marble—they’re ideals. They’re made of stars, sunlight, moonshine. I believe in treating them like beings of a higher world.”
“I disagree with all of you,” Frank said ponderously, “I don’t believe in treating them as if they were pets or dolls, or goddesses on pedestals or ideals. I believe in treating them like human beings, the other half of the race. I don’t see that they are any better or any worse than we—they’re about the same. Soon after we captured them, you remember, we entered into an agreement that no one of us would ever let his wife’s wings grow without the consent of all the others. One minute after I had given my word, I was sorry for it. But you kept your word to me in the agreement that I forced on you before the capture; and, so, I shall always keep mine to you. But I regret it more and more as time goes on. You see I’m so constituted that I can’t see anything but abstract justice. And according to abstract justice we have no right to hold these women bound to the earth. If the air is their natural habitat, it is criminal for us to keep them out of it. They’re our equals in every sense—I mean in that they supplement us, as we supplement them. They’ve got what we haven’t got and we’ve got what they haven’t got. They can’t walk, but they can fly. We can’t fly, but we can walk. It is as though they compelled us, creatures of the earth, to live in the air all the time. Oh, it’s wrong. You’ll see it some day.”
“I never listened to such sophistry in my life,” said Ralph in disgust. “You’ll be telling us next,” he added sarcastically, “that we hadn’t any right to capture them.”
“We hadn’t,” Frank replied promptly. “On reflection, I consider that the second greatest crime of my existence. But that’s done and can’t be wiped out. They own this island just as much as we do. They’d been coming to it for months before we saw it. They ought to have every kind of right and freedom and privilege on it that we, have.”