'You will stay your month?' he inquired at last, coldly. 'You don't propose, I imagine, to leave me at a moment's notice?'
She was bending over her table, and did not look up.
'Oh yes, I will stay my month.'
He sat speechless, watching her. She very quickly finished what she was doing, and taking up her note-book, and some half-written letters, she left the room.
'A pretty state of things!' said the Squire, and thrusting his long hands into his pockets he began to pace the library, in the kind of temper that may be imagined—given the man and the circumstances.
The difference, however, between this occasion and others lay in the fact that the penalties of temper had grown so unjustly heavy. The Squire felt himself hideously aggrieved. Abominable!—that he should be hindered in his just rights and opinions by this indirect pressure from a woman, whom he couldn't wrestle with and floor, as he would a man, because of her sex. That was always the way with women. No real equality—no give and take—in spite of all the suffrage talk. Their weakness was their tyranny. Weakness indeed! They were much stronger than men. God help England when they got the vote! The Greeks said it—Euripides said it. But, of course, the Greeks have said everything! Hecuba to Agamemnon, for instance, when she is planning the murder of the Thracian King:
'Leave it to me!—and my Trojan women!'
And Agamemnon's scoffing reply—poor idiot!—'How can women get the better of men?'
And Hecuba's ghastly low-voiced 'In a crowd we are terrible!'—δεινον το πληθος—as she and her women turn upon the Thracian, put out his eyes, and tear his children limb from limb.
But one woman might be quite enough to upset a quiet man's way of living! The moral pressure of it was so iniquitous! Your convictions or your life! It was the language of a footpad.