“Was I not plain enough? I mean that you will never have the chance to crush me into your iron mould, for I will never marry you.”
“What!” And then: “So I’m fired, am I?” he grated out.
“Yes, for you’re as narrow and as conventional as the rest of men,” she rushed on hotly. “You never say a word so long as a woman’s work is unpleasant! It’s all right for her to scrub, and wash dishes, and wear her life away in factories. But as soon as she wants to do any work that is pleasant and interesting and that will gain her recognition, you cry out that she’s unwomanly, unsexed, that she’s flying in the face of God! Oh, you are perfectly willing that woman, on the one hand, should be a drudge, or on the other the pampered pet of your one-woman harem. But I shall be neither, I tell you. Never! Never! Never!”
They stared at one another, trembling with passion.
“And you,” he said with all the fierce irony of his soul, “and you, I suppose, will now go ahead and clear your father, expose Blake, and perform all those other wonders you’ve talked so big about!”
“That’s just what I am going to do!” she cried defiantly.
“And that’s just what you are not!” he blazed back. “I may have admired the woman in you—but, for those things, you have not the smallest atom of ability. Your father’s trial, your failure to get evidence—hasn’t that shown you? You are going to be a failure—a fizzle—a fiasco! Did you hear that? A pitiable, miserable, humiliated fiasco! And time will prove it!”
“We’ll see what time will prove!” And she swept furiously past him out of the room.