He had not meant it so but of course he seemed disparaging her.
“Perhaps,” she said rather frigidly, “perhaps I’ll not be such a figurehead as you think.”
“But I didn’t mean to say that to hurt you.”
“I’m not sure what you do mean. It seems to me we’re actually childish. You’ve chosen, quite deliberately, to be a reactionary in all this woman’s progress movement. I’m sorry. But there is a loyalty one has to women, Gage, beside the loyalty one has to a husband and I really cannot share your prejudice against progress, as it applies to women.”
The unexpressed things in Gage’s mind fairly tore at him.
“If you really had one sensible objection, Gage—”
“There’s just one objection,” he said, doggedly, “you desecrate yourself. Not by entering politics particularly. But by using yourself that way. You mutilate your sex.”
She did not get angry. But she put one hand on his shoulder and they looked at each other helplessly.
“Don’t you see,” said Helen, “that I want, like these other women, to once in a while do something that’s clean of sex? That’s just me—without sex?”
His eyes grew very hard. She struck almost mortally at the very thing he loved most. And he moved away, as if to remove himself definitely.