“That is where historians do their humble best for you,” said he. “It does sort the masses into a few main heaps that tend to move about in definite directions, and even clear the ground by destroying one another.”
“Yes, that is a man’s only idea of deciding an argument,” said his wife. “He has never been able to understand anything more intelligent than blood. And as long as women are silly enough to go on providing children and handing them over to him the supply will be kept up and arguments will be decided in that way.”
“I am afraid I must go in and do a little work,” said he, rising with a sigh.
“Good-bye,” said his wife, “I’ll come along later.”
They sat talking until it was time to go in to tea. Evangeline began to feel her contentment in the outdoor life she loved give way gradually before the force of purpose that Mrs. Vachell brought with her. The Sphinx who looked so calm among hungry crowds had the opposite effect on Evangeline’s simple enjoyment of things as they are. The smothered rebellion that is hidden by pride so long as the enemy is overpowering may suddenly break out and inflame a peaceful party of shepherds and set them running and shouting for an end that they never contemplated or desired. Evangeline had been suffering under a sense of heavy depression when she came away to the sea. She felt herself up against an obstacle that was not to be moved because it moved with her and encircled her from all sides, closing her in and shutting out all the new joys of the future that she had seen ahead of her when Ivor was born. Every step she took was hampered by fear that she might be sending him farther away from her, some incident might arise that would strengthen Evan’s conviction that she was not fit to have the charge of him. Then when she hid her sympathy from Ivor and forced herself to suffer for the sake of keeping him with her, she could see a look of childish judgment in his eyes that placed her unjustly in the category she dreaded, that of people who have grown up and are beyond the pale of confidence from the young. If she went on pretending for his sake, she said to herself, he would become like Romulus and Remus, living in his own thoughts without a mother. The idea made her almost mad at times.
Alone with Teresa and Ivor by the sea, she had got back her confidence, her nature being of the kind that expects a trouble left behind to remain where it is without attempting pursuit. She kept no record of the occasions when this hope had been disappointed. The things Mrs. Vachell talked of that afternoon showed her something entirely new to her. She understood, to her great surprise, that all over the world were thousands of other Evangelines, suffering as she did, from the inexplicable harshness of men towards those precious, irrational gambollings of the mind, that move women to actions that are condemned as “unreasonable,” “inconsistent,” “illogical,” “false,” “silly,” and generally lacking in orderly sequence. She learned that she was not alone, fighting something sinister that had no shape and perhaps was only a disorder of her own imagination. Mrs. Vachell explained that the enemy was terribly real and powerful; the enemy of all true women whose duty it was to unite in fighting to the last drop of their blood.
“Women are not stupid,” she said in her slow, deep voice, “they are not irrational. What you see in Ivor and dread to lose—what your husband does not see—is what comes into the world by women, and your husband thinks it foolish because it is not in him. He wants to preserve his own qualities; you want to preserve yours; they are wholly contradictory, and one side or the other must impose its will.”
“But I thought men were supposed to adore women for having just what they haven’t got, just as we adore them for their physical strength and their brains.”
“So they say, and so we say, because otherwise there would be no marriages,” said Mrs. Vachell. “But it is a lie. We only love their strength for the sake of getting the better of it. They cultivate our foolishness because it gives them rest from competition, and they can sit down and plume themselves. Each wants the power, and the centuries of suffering that we have gone through have taught us to see love as the only thing worth having, while they still look on it as a pleasant fad to be indulged in when they have finished arranging who is to get the most of what belongs, by right, equally to all. It is all very pretty, you will find, if you look into it.”