Her remark might have borne various interpretations, either that she knew nothing about herself, that she despised her own sex too much to include herself in it, or that she had tacitly adopted Durant's attitude, which seemed to leave her altogether outside of the discussion. He talked to her unconsciously, without any desire to please, as if he assumed that she expected as little from him as he from her. She never reminded him that she was a woman. It would have been absurd if she had insisted on it, and whatever she was Miss Tancred was not absurd.
She went on calmly, "So I can't say what they care for most; can you?"
"You know my opinion. I wanted yours."
"Mine isn't worth much. But I should say that in these things no two women were alike. You talk as if they were all made of the same stuff."
"So they are inside—in their souls, I mean."
"There's more unlikeness in their souls, I imagine, than there ever is in their bodies; and you wouldn't say an ugly woman was quite the same as a pretty one, would you?"
"Yes; in the obvious sense that they are both women. I admit that there may be an ugliness that cancels sex, to say nothing of a beauty that transcends it; but in either case the woman is unique."
"And if the woman, why not her soul?"
"Because—because—because there is a certain psychical quality that is eternal and unchangeable; because the soul is the seat of the cosmic difference we call sex. In man or woman that is the one unalterable fact—the last reality."
He spoke coldly, brutally almost, as if he, like herself, was blind to the pathos of her ignored and rejected womanhood.