Neither tone nor manner was pleasant. Agnes laid her hand upon his arm.
“Won’t you go on with what you were about to say? I may not be able to argue. I think, with you, that logic is not woman’s forte. Perhaps we may learn, with time and education, to divorce thought and feeling. But I am a capital listener, and a willing learner.”
“You are an angel”—pressing the hand to his side, “and so far above Miss Marvel and her compeers in intellect and breeding that I fret at the alleged partnership. This talk of woman’s serfdom and the need of elevating her, mentally and politically, is stuff from first to last. Vile and pestilential stuff! Heresy against the teachings of Nature and of Him who ordained that man should be the superior being of the two. Those who are pressing forward in what they call Reform of Existing Wrongs are your worst enemies. You should need no champion but your other self, Man. In arraying one sex against the other, you antagonize him. I see this rampant attitude of woman everywhere and hourly. If a man resigns his seat in a public conveyance to a woman, she takes it arrogantly—not gratefully. She pushes him aside with sharp elbows in crowds, jostles him upon gangways, presses before him into doors, always with a ‘good-as-you’ air which exasperates the most amiable of us. Her voice is heard in debating societies; she sits beside man upon the rostrum; competes with him in business, often successfully, because she can live upon less than he. The devilish spirit of revolt permeates all grades of society. The home—God’s best gift to earth—has no longer a recognized governor, no judge to whom appeal is final. Sisters wrangle with brothers for equal educational advantages, instead of making home so pleasant that boys will be content to stay there. Women’s Clubs, Women’s Congresses, Women’s Protective Unions, are part and parcel of the disunion policy. Instead of refining man this is surely, if slowly, arousing the latent savage in him. When that does spring to action, let the weaker sex beware. Outraged natural laws will right themselves in the long run, but sometimes at fearful cost.”
Agnes was perfectly silent during this harangue, ignorant as was he of his resemblance to pudgy and pompous Uncle Simeon, while he beat the palm of the right hand with the empty left-hand glove, and rolled slightly from one leg to the other in the slow promenade. The bloom gradually receded from her cheeks, her profile was still and clear as a cameo. Her eyes were directed toward the gray-blues of the meeting line of wave and sky. Once she glanced up to follow the gull, rising from a fifth unsuccessful dip.
Presently she halted and leaned upon the parapet to watch the half-consumed cigar, swinging and bumping like a truncated canoe in the foam-fringes of the rising tide. Barton stopped with her without staying his talk. An impulse born of the innate savagery he imputed to his sex, bore him on. His wife’s very impassiveness irked him. Silence was non-sympathetic; white silence, like hers, chilling. Irritation, engendered by piqued vanity, does not withhold the home-thrust because the victim is dearly beloved.
“You do not like to hear me talk in this strain,” he pursued. “It is only natural that a woman of independent thought and action, accustomed to adulation, and to whom the excitement of a public hearing for whatever she has to say has become a necessity of existence; who has looked beyond the quiet round of home interests and home loves for a career; who has fed her imagination upon unreal scenes and situations—should——”
He could get no further. Fluent as he was in speech, he had wound himself up in nominative specifications, and the verb climax failed him unexpectedly.
“Should—what?” said Agnes, turning the set, tintless visage toward him. Her eyes, blank and questionless, showed how far from her thought was sarcastic pleasure in his discomfiture. Barton was too much incensed to reason.
“Should—and does sneer at her husband’s serious talk upon a matter in which, as he is fast discovering, his happiness is fatally involved!”
“Fatally! O Barton!”