"Oh! yes, you do," Honoria declared. "At least, you certainly will when I explain it to you."—She paused.—"You see," she said, "it is like this. Living with and watching Cousin Katherine, I have come to know all that side of things at its very finest."
"Forgive me.—It? What? May I recall to you the fact of the Philistine nursery?"
The young lady's delicate face straightened.
"You know perfectly well what I mean," she said.—"That which we all think about so constantly, and yet affect to speak of as a joke or a slight impropriety—love, marriage, motherhood."
"Yes, Lady Calmady is a past-master in those arts," Mr. Quayle replied.—Again the ground was holy. He was conscious his pulse quickened.
"The beauty of it all, as one sees it in her case, breaks one up a little. There is no laugh left in one about those things. One sees that to her they are of the nature of religion—a religion pure and undefiled, a new way of knowing God and of bringing oneself into line with the truth as it is in Him. But, having once seen that, one can decline upon no lower level. One grows ambitious. One will have it that way or not at all."
Honoria paused again. The bleak wind buffeted her. But she was no longer troubled or chilled by it, rather did it brace her to greater fearlessness of resolve and of speech.
"You are contemptuous of women," she said.
"I have betrayed characteristics of the ass, other than its patience," Ludovic lamented.
"Oh! I didn't mean that," Honoria returned, smiling in friendliest fashion upon him. "Every man worth the name really feels as you do, I imagine. I don't blame you. Possibly I am growing a trifle shaky as to feminine superiority, and woman spelled with a capital letter, myself. I'm awfully afraid she is safest—for herself and others—under slight restraint, in a state of mild subjection. She's not quite to be trusted, either intellectually or emotionally—at least, the majority of her isn't. If she got her head, I've a dreadful suspicion she would make a worse hash of creation generally than you men have made of it already, and that"—Honoria's eyes narrowed, her upper lip shortened, and her smile shone out again delightfully—"that's saying a very great deal, you know."