“And suppose the threads of your pattern get restive,” I asked, “and won’t stay in their proper positions. Are you never confronted with a blazing flower of the tropics when you were at work on a daisy?”
“No,” she replied quite seriously; “but if I were, of course I should work it in somehow.”
“Does Reginald embroider on the same plan?” I asked after a pause.
“I expect not,” she answered; “because I don’t think that men are so wrapped up in themselves as we are—I don’t mean fond of themselves, I mean wrapped up. And another thing. I never think that there is much substance in my mind except what other people put in—and that, I admit, I develop very nicely—but Reginald has stuff of his own which he spins out of his inner consciousness, and which takes shape when it encounters facts. I don’t know whether that is the difference between other men and women, but I have an idea that if Moses had been a woman he would have come back from the wilderness rather bereft of ideas, and not having done any useful thinking at all. Perhaps his (or her) mind would have ‘turned on itself,’ as they say, and he (or she) would have been at loggerheads with all the fowls of the air. ‘There was a most impertinent vulture,’ the female Moses would have told the children of Israel, ‘who made a point of settling down first on whichever rock I had arranged to sit on. Of course if I had been a man he wouldn’t have dared. It has taken me forty years of intense thought to dodge him, but I believe I could manage it now if I went back.’”
“But Moses had no society, either, to help his great thoughts to take shape,” I said pettishly; “and when he did get back he was a kill-joy, and finally died of temper.”
“Well, my dear,” said Polly, “you find taking two children to the seaside quite as much as you can manage. I don’t know, I’m sure, what you would say to forty thousand, or whatever the number was whom Moses took. If you got through as well as he did you’d be lucky. And remember, he had to keep them amused for more than a month.”
Polly is like that; it is impossible to take any of her arguments to a logical conclusion. I tried to make her see that Reginald was very forbearing to find all his ideals of womanhood in her without seeking outside inspiration, and she said that “men were like that”; they had no ideals, and were prepared to take just anything and muddle along with it provided it fulfilled some of its purposes. “Have you ever watched them shopping?” she asked; “they never turn out a whole shop as we do. They say, vaguely looking round, ‘Is this all you have?’ and the girl, of course, grins and says, ‘Yes, it is the very best, and the other kinds are never asked for now’; and he says, ‘Oh, very well then, just send it up, will you, please,’ and he pays far too much for it. Now we, even when we have bought a thing, often see something else that would have done far better, and then we fret over it, or take steps to alter it. That is idealism.”
“Oh, Polly!” I remonstrated. “You make my head ache so. Do you mean that men are never discontented with their wives? And, besides, you said yourself that all the other men you saw only made you admire Reginald the more.”