“It is harder, in the long run, to waltz eternally round it with averted eyes.”
“But, dear me, why is the truth about ourselves hard to face?” demanded Valeria.
“I am placed between the horns of a dilemma: one lady clamours for the bare truth: another forbids me to say anything unpleasing.”
“I withdraw my objection,” Valeria offered.
“The ungracious task shall not be forced upon unwilling chivalry,” said Hadria. “If our conditions have been evil, some scars must be left and may as well be confessed. Among the faults of women, I should place a tendency to trade upon and abuse real chivalry and generosity when they meet them: a survival perhaps from the Stone Age, when the fittest to bully were the surviving elect of society.”
Hadria’s eyes sparkled with suppressed excitement.
“Freedom alone teaches us to meet generosity, generously,” said Professor Fortescue; “you can’t get the perpendicular virtues out of any but the really free-born.”
“Then do you describe women’s virtues as horizontal?” enquired Miss Du Prel, half resentfully.
“In so far as they follow the prevailing models. Women’s love, friendship, duty, the conduct of life as a whole, speaking very roughly, has been lacking in the quality that I call perpendicular; a quality implying something more than upright.”
“You seem to value but lightly the woman’s acknowledged readiness for self-sacrifice,” said Lady Engleton. “That, I suppose, is only a despised horizontal virtue.”