“Incongruity! Think what it means for a girl to have been taught to connect the idea of something low and evil with that which nevertheless is to lie at the foundation of all her after life. That is what it amounts to, and people complain that women are not logical.”
Lady Engleton laughed. “Fortunately things work better in practice than might be expected, judging them in the abstract. How bashful Professor Theobald seems suddenly to have become! Why doesn’t he join us, I wonder? However, so much the better; I do like to hear you talk heresy.”
“I do more than talk it, I mean it,” said Hadria. “I fail utterly to get at the popular point of view.”
“But you misrepresent it—there are modifying facts in the case.”
“I don’t see them. Girls are told: ‘So and so is not a nice thing for you to talk about. Wait, however, until the proper signal is given, and then woe betide you if you don’t cheerfully accept it as your bounden duty.’ If that does not enjoin abject slavishness and deliberate immorality of the most cold-blooded kind, I simply don’t know what does.”
Lady Engleton seemed to ponder somewhat seriously, as she stood looking down at the grave beside her.
“How we ever came to have tied ourselves into such an extraordinary mental knot is what bewilders me,” Hadria continued, “and still more, why it is that we all, by common consent, go on acting and talking as if the tangled skein ran smooth and straight through one’s fingers.”
“Chiefly, perhaps, because women won’t speak out,” suggested Lady Engleton.
“They have been so drilled,” cried Hadria, “so gagged, so deafened, by ‘the shrieks of near relations.’”
Lady Engleton was asking for an explanation, when the wedding-bells began to clang out from the belfry, merry and roughly rejoicing. “Tom-boy bells,” Hadria called them. They seemed to tumble over one another and pick themselves up again, and give chase, and roll over in a heap, and then peal firmly out once more, laughing at their romping digression, joyous and thoughtless and simple-hearted. “Evidently without the least notion what they are celebrating,” said Hadria.