“You can’t go now,” said Amory significantly. “Think for a moment and you’ll see that you can’t go now. People can’t make charges and then run away. It isn’t done, Dorothy.”
“How absurd! Who’s made charges?”
“I understood you to say that I was a pretender?”
“Don’t be so ridiculous! You know very well what I mean!”
“Then you should be more careful about your expressions, Dorothy. Expression is all people have to go by, you know; expression’s precisely art, in fact. But I should like you to tell whoever it is who’s been talking about me and Cosimo something.”
“What’s that?” Dorothy grunted over her shoulder.
“You can tell them that they could be present at every one of those dreadful meetings and hear every word we say, if that’s the idea. They wouldn’t take any harm; in fact, it might take them out of themselves for a bit. And even if it was as they supposed, I don’t admit that that would be as important as they seem to think. An altogether false importance is given to these things, Dorothy. My friendship with Cosimo wouldn’t be one bit less beautiful whatever the ‘conclusions’ were people drew. Nor one bit more. I’m not a pretender, Dorothy. I don’t pretend to be any wiser than I am. But I do think I’m rational. I—object—most—strongly” (she gave each word its special emphasis) “to this really secondary matter of sex being made a thing of the first importance. I hope that’s all going to be changed before very long, and that more enlightened views will take its place. And, really, the brave women of the Movement are the very last people who ought to be talked about in that way. They haven’t time for such things. They’ve far, far too much to do. I know some are married, but they have the true conception of marriage; it’s the rational conception, not mere legalized tyranny on the one hand and submission on the other. So though we don’t admit that what’s commonly called virtue has anything to do with it one way or the other, we give you the virtue in as a sort of present. I think I shall have to lend you John Stuart Mill, Dorothy; he’d clear your ideas on the subject. I’ll lend you Subjection. It’s all in there, art and everything. If you read only a quarter of an hour every night you’ll soon feel the benefit. Do read him.... And now I must go. I’m sorry if our talk has seemed a bit of a wrangle, but I have to state these things fearlessly, you see. At whatever cost we have to avoid false positions. The world really doesn’t matter that so long as we have the Right on our side. Do try to see it, Dorothy.—Good-bye.”
She touched Dorothy’s hand and turned away to the door; but, for all her serenity, one thought and one thought only occupied her as she plunged into Hallowells’ labyrinth again and wandered through rooms and corridors in search of the way out. The more she thought of it the less it bore thinking of. It was the thought that Dorothy had to all intents and purposes told her that she allowed Cosimo to admire her and to help her to take down her glorious hair for the same reason that Dorothy sat on a box eating sandwiches with her own unenlightened young man, and that when young men came into the question there was not a pin to choose between them after all.
“Poor, dear, dull old thing!” she muttered as she left Hallowells’. “And it’s she who pretends, for she’d have given anything to have heard me coming. All the same, if it had been me and Cosimo....”
It would have been irrational, but she supposed she would have resented an intrusion too. Inherited prejudice is very strong....