Miss Temperley shook her head. “I don’t see that any ‘tyranny,’ as you call it, exonerates a mother from her duty to her child.”
“There we differ. Motherhood, in our present social state, is the sign and seal as well as the means and method of a woman’s bondage. It forges chains of her own flesh and blood; it weaves cords of her own love and instinct. She agonizes, and the fruit of her agony is not even legally hers. Name me a position more abject! A woman with a child in her arms is, to me, the symbol of an abasement, an indignity, more complete, more disfiguring and terrible, than any form of humiliation that the world has ever seen.”
“You must be mad!” exclaimed Miss Temperley. “That symbol has stood to the world for all that is sweetest and holiest.”
“I know it has! So profound has been our humiliation!”
“I don’t know what to say to anyone so wrong-headed and so twisted in sentiment.”
Hadria smiled thoughtfully.
“While I am about it, I may as well finish this disclosure of feeling, which, again I warn you, is not peculiar to myself, however you may lay that flattering unction to your soul. I have seen and heard of many a saddening evidence of our sex’s slavery since I came to this terrible and wonderful city: the crude, obvious buying and selling that we all shudder at; but hideous as it is, to me it is far less awful than this other respectable form of degradation that everyone glows and smirks over.”
Miss Temperley clasped her hands in despair.
“I simply can’t understand you. What you say is rank heresy against all that is most beautiful in human nature.”
“Surely the rank heresy is to be laid at the door of those who degrade and enslave that which they assert to be most beautiful in human nature. But I am not speaking to convince; merely to shew where you cannot count upon me for a point of attack. Try something else.”