“Dicky will find friends, of course,” said Susie. “One can always find some good in everybody if one is prepared to look for it.”
“Yes, I don’t think there will be any difficulty,” said David.
“What do you think about Evan going into this business of Mr. Price’s?” she asked.
“It ought to be quite easy I think,” he answered. “It is what he likes.”
“Yes, but Evan does like such curious things,” said Susie. “His is a most interesting nature; so upright; but I often wonder how Evangeline, with her very sunny disposition, chose anyone with such very strong religious views. Religion always seems to me to be a thing that should be so helpful in making it easier to stand up against things that go wrong. One sees so much suffering in a place like this that unless one can be sure that it is all intended and for the best, one would be inclined to dwell too much on it. Now Evan, it seems to me, instead of seeing it like that, often makes it sadder by supposing things to be worse than they are. He used to take the gloomiest view of poor little Ivor in his childish naughtiness, though he is really a good little boy and very obedient if one just smooths over difficulties with a little tact. Nurse is not always very wise with him. She goes on persisting at the time, instead of waiting until he has forgotten and letting him do whatever it is of his own accord, when he is interested in something else. That is Evan’s mistake I am sure. He is always on the look out for sad things and it makes him so difficult to interest. Now my husband is all the other way. He won’t believe that anything matters, and I think that Evangeline is rather like him. They have no sympathy for any aims beyond the present. Do you know Mrs. Vachell well?”
“Not very,” David replied.
“Do you like her?”
“I don’t think she wants people to either like or dislike her, so I haven’t got so far,” he said. He would have been candid with Teresa or Evangeline or many other people, but he had a deep-rooted distrust of Susie as a receptacle for words. They meant so little to her that she was liable to pass them on as coinage in conversation and give no goods of her own in exchange, so there was no bargain that she was likely to respect between her and whoever she talked to. He felt this instinctively and had no dealings with her, not being willing, like Cyril, to declare himself bankrupt for the joy of riotous living.
“She believes very much in women,” Susie went on. “Her idea is that some day all those things that I was talking about, the love of finer tastes and of children, and all the confidence and dislike of harshness and ugliness that woman feels so much will come more to the front and have more influence. There may be something in it, for although I dislike the idea of women going into the world, still, if they can do any good I am sure it is right for them not to hold back; for the sake of the unmarried ones who have to earn a living. It does seem terrible, don’t you think, that there should be no way for those who are not intellectual to live except by pleasing men in the wrong way; because that is what it comes to, whether they are married or not. And if they are not good looking it is even worse. They ought to be as well paid for cultivating the higher side of life as for pandering to the lower. A loving nature is of as much value to the world as a brain that invents war material; and, as it is, men only use it as a toy for every sort of coarser instinct.”
“But does Mrs. Vachell suggest a sort of spiritual—market?” David asked, hesitatingly, roused at last out of his burrow by the logical enticements that Susie had been aiming at him. “Aren’t there enough people who sell themselves in that way already?”