“You like people to be happy, I know,” said Mrs. Vachell. “Why not take steps to make them so? Don’t you find, for instance, that men have too much power over their families?”
Evangeline’s private anxieties awoke. “Do you mean when they can say how children are to be brought up?”
“Yes, that among other things.” Mrs. Vachell observed her closely.
“They oughtn’t to,” said Evangeline. “They don’t understand——”
“Have you read Iris Smith’s pamphlet on the matriarchate?” asked Mr. Fisk.
“No, I haven’t read anything deep,” she replied. “What is the thing? You don’t mean that sort of solid turquoise?” She supposed him to have changed the subject out of modesty. He looked scared and Mrs. Vachell laughed.
“Mrs. Hatton is only a potential ally,” she explained to him. “She has the real instinct, which is worth all the learning in the world. Books are only useful for downing the catchwords of stupid people who won’t think. How would you like it,” she continued to Evangeline, “if your husband insisted on your boy being brought up at some particular school and you knew that he would be bullied and misunderstood there, and that all the tenderness you love would be crushed out of him; and suppose you found after he went that he came back despising you in his heart for being of the inferior sex, though he still caressed you as a dear old silly whom he could get material comforts from and put down with one hand in any discussion?”
“Boys aren’t like that,” said Evangeline frowning. “I know they are not—not English boys, anyhow,” she added with a look at Mr. Fisk’s hair, to which she had taken a sudden dislike.
“They have been just like that since a date so far back that I don’t believe you have ever heard of it,” Mrs. Vachell assured her. “That is why you will find it interesting to read books some day.”
Evangeline stayed to tea and came back more incensed than ever against Evan’s theories and more than ever in love with his masculinity.