"Frightened? What of? Would you be frightened?"
When he was obliged to admit that he would not be what you'd call frightened, "but a girl—"
"Rot! Why should a girl be frightened? I shall take a revolver."
After that, naturally, Feminism became the engrossing theme, bringing with it, as usual, those shallow generalizations that so often belittle this vital and terrible subject, even as creeds sometimes belittle Religion. To Fred's mind, as to many serious minds, Feminism had a religious significance; but she did not know—arrogance never does know!—the stigma her conceit put upon her cause.
"Look at the unrest of women, everywhere. I don't mean the agitation for suffrage;—that is just a symptom of it. It is yeast," she said, with passion; "yeast! We can't help it; something is fermenting; something is pushing us. All kinds of women feel it. I know, because I go round to the factories and talk to the girls at their noon hour, trying to get them to organize—that's the only way we can get the men to do what we want. Organization! Women have got to get together! I've made a door-to-door canvass for our league, and I came up against this—this, I don't know what to call it! this stirring, among women. Every woman (except fat old dames whose minds stopped growing when they had their first baby) is stirred, somehow. Twenty years from now the women who are girls to-day won't be putting picture puzzles together for want of something better to do." The contempt in her voice revealed nothing to Howard Maitland, who scarcely knew the poor, dull lady in the sitting-room on Payton Street; but he wondered why Fred's face suddenly reddened. "No; girls are doing things! When they get to middle age their brains won't be chubby. Look at the factories, and shops, and offices—all full of women! Girls don't have to knuckle down any more, and 'obey'; they can say 'Thank you for nothing!' and break away, and support themselves. I tell you what! this life servitude that men have imposed upon women of looking after the home, is done, done, for good and all! That sweet creature, 'the devoted wife,' is being labeled 'kept woman,'—but the ballot is the key to her prison door!"
"Bully simile," he said.
"But isn't it all queer—the change in things?" she said, her voice suddenly vague and wondering; "it's a sort of race movement, with Truth as the motive power. It's bigger than just—people. Even our parlor-maid, Flora, feels it! She wants to do something; she doesn't know what. (I wish she'd put her energies into laundering the centerpieces better, but I regret to say she has a soul above laundry.) Yes, things are stirring! It's yeast."
Such talk was new to Howard. Until now, his young Chivalry had concerned itself only with women's demand for suffrage—which, as Frederica Payton had very truly said, is only a symptom, alarming, or amusing, or divine, as you may happen to look at it—of the world-unrest which she called "feminism." He was keenly interested.
"Gosh, Fred," he said, soberly, as she ended with the assertion that Feminism was the most interesting thing that had come into the Race Conscienceness since humanity began to stand on its hind legs—"gosh, I take off my hat to you!" His admiration was not so much for the thing she was trying to do, as for the fact that she was trying! She was doing something—anything!—instead of sitting around, like most people, in observant and disapproving idleness. He forgot her snub about his shells; his eyes were ardent with admiring assent to everything she said. "You are the limit!" he said, earnestly.
And she, speaking passionately her poor, bare, ugly facts—all true, but verging on lies, because no one of them was the whole Truth—going deeper into her adventure of candor, felt, suddenly, a quickening of the blood. She had an impulse to put out her hand and touch him—the big, sprawling, handsome fellow! His voice, agreeing to all she said, made her quiver into momentary silence, as a harp-string quivers under a twanging and muting thumb. That his assents, which gave her such acute satisfaction, were merely her own convictions, thrown back to her by the sounding-board of his good nature, she did not realize. The intellectual attraction she felt in him was hers. The other attraction, which was his, she did not analyze. She realized only that something seemed to swell in her throat and her breathing quickened. The newness of the sensation threw her off the track of her argument, which was to prove that women would save society by facing facts—"facts" being, apparently, the single one of sex.