“You mustn’t make her seem so unscrupulous.”
“Aren’t charming women supposed to be unscrupulous?” asked Matthew, generalizing quickly.
“Women aren’t anything they are supposed to be. Less than ever just now. They are an agglomerate mass of individuals, no one of whom and no group of whom is strong enough to set the fashion for the rest of us. But now that we vote and move more acceptedly in general circles we may develop a new feminine type. Perhaps. We’ve tried to in the last fifty years. We tried the bicycle riding type and the masculinized college woman and the clubwoman type and the suffragist crusader and the newer college woman who goes in for sociology and the job-holding woman who was a war growth largely—I mean the woman who holds a job because she likes work and not because she couldn’t marry out of it. Well, all those types are experiments. They aren’t perfected types. The genuine old-fashioned housewife—domestic, motherly——”
“Not all of the old-fashioned women were like that,” Matthew checked her up amusedly.
“Put in your dash of courtesan, if you like, young man. That’s what you mean. It didn’t alter the general type. Women were women, then. Now, aside from physical similarities women are not women. You used to be able to group them by something else than physical qualities. But you can’t any more.”
“And what’s the answer?”
“Where did I start, and why did I start? My squab will be wrested from me in a minute. Wait until I have a bite.”
“You started from unscrupulous women. I think your first remark was that women aren’t anything they’re supposed to be.”
“Yes. Where I meant to end—and I can do it quickly—is to say that nothing any one can say applies to women as a class, for women no longer accept or believe in standards for themselves as a sex. They are creatures of shifting standards—unhappy or happy as the mood may strike them. They have no permanent standards.”
“No standards at all?”