“Don’t talk about women as if they were all alike,” said Teresa impatiently. “It is as bad as Mrs. Carpenter. She is always saying, ‘we women are so something or other,’ and Mother says, ‘but then, don’t you think women are so something else.’ But they both give you an idea of somebody very noble and forlorn in the position of Daniel in the den of lions. I am sure that there are certain qualities in people, courage and truthfulness and meanness and greed and all the rest, and everybody has some of them in different mixtures; it doesn’t make any difference whether they are male or female or rich or poor. It is so silly trying to label people into classes and species according to their incomes or their sex. Nationality divides them up a little, I admit, but otherwise you are just asking for trouble by presupposing any vice or virtues.”
“Well, then, men should stop presupposing that women have no brains and no morals,” said Evangeline.
“I don’t believe that any woman with either has ever bothered what was presupposed about her, or had any difficulty in convincing anyone to whom it mattered,” Teresa replied.
“But that is nonsense, Dicky. You know it was only when women had to be employed in the war that they had a chance to show what they could do. Look at women doctors before they began to run their own hospitals.”
“Well, that is exactly what I have been trying to explain. It all came of that abominable system of classifying. Women were this and women were that, and it was very largely their own fault. Which sex was it that used to say, ‘My dear, that is unladylike. Don’t imitate that nasty bold girl who handles mice as if she were a navvy’? Now they are allowed to be competent or incompetent, as nature made them, and you are doing your best to rebuild the whole obstacle by saying, ‘All women are not what you think them. They are all something else. They have all got lovely, pure, high-browed minds and all men have horrid brutish ones.’ You are only changing a guerilla war into a series of pitched battles. I detest Mrs. Vachell. She looks like a martyr, and she is only a hunger striker.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she is a rebel with no sense of adventure. She will plot against any sort of power that galls her personally, and I don’t think she uses fair means; there’s no gallantry about her. It is all spitting and kicking and causing harmless people inconvenience.”
“I think you are most unfair,” said Evangeline hotly. “She is out against all sorts of tyranny, the sort of tyranny that Evan would exercise over Ivor if he could; the tyranny of horrid vulgar people who never do a stroke of work and have no brains and simply live on enormous incomes, while women are sweated and slave-driven or forced on to the street. It has nothing to do with her personally; Mr. Vachell is the least interfering man in the world, and they are not particularly hard up.”
“Whom does she think she is going to do good to by making you fed up with Evan?”
“She doesn’t; but she has made me see why it is that he doesn’t understand children and why I have to stand up to him if I want to save Ivor. And you know, Dicky, it is such a joke, because Evan thinks her perfect and is always holding her up as a model of dignity and common sense. That is why I want Mrs. Trotter to come. It does make me so irritated to see him stalking along thinking Mrs. Vachell is listening with the deepest interest to what he says, and all the time she is boiling like a volcano, and when she looks quietest I know she is quite white hot with contempt for something he has said.”