“Perhaps not; tradition prevents them from using bad language, but they feel, they feel.”
“Young girls perhaps, brought up very ignorantly, find life a little scaring at first, but they soon settle down into happy wives and mothers.”
“As the fibre grows coarser,” assented Hadria.
“No; as the affections awaken, and the instincts that hold society together, come into play. I have revolted myself from the conditions of life, but it is a hopeless business—beating one’s wings against the bars.”
“The bars are, half of them, of human construction,” said Hadria, “and against those one may surely be allowed to beat.”
“Of human construction?”
“I mean that prejudice, rather than instinct, has built up the system that Mrs. Gordon so amiably represents.”
“Prejudice has perhaps taken advantage of instinct to establish a somewhat tyrannical tradition,” Miss Du Prel admitted, “but instinct is at the bottom of it. There is, of course, in our society, no latitude for variety of type; that is the fault of so many institutions.”
“The ordinary domestic idea may have been suitable when women were emerging from the condition of simple animals,” said Hadria, “but now it seems to me to be out of date.”
“It can never be entirely out of date, dear Hadria. Nature has asked of women a great and hard service, but she has given them the maternal instinct and its joys, in compensation for the burden of this task, which would otherwise be intolerable and impossible. It can only be undertaken at the instigation of some stupendous impetus, that blinds the victim to the nature of her mission. It must be a sort of obsession; an intense personal instinct, amounting to madness. Nature, being determined to be well served in this direction, has supplied the necessary monomania, and the domestic idea, as you call it, grows up round this central fact.”