Since I said nothing, she went on, "You're the author who hates women!" There was shine in her eyes, then—challenge—amusement. Spite, too.
"Only moms," I answered. "And not 'hate'—deplore."
"And Cinderellas, too!"
"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten the Cinderellas. I deplore them, also."
"Maybe I'm one."
"A superior specimen—if true." I am semigallant.
"What made you hate women so violently? Did your mother beat you? And why do you blame everything that goes wrong on women?" Two hard lines showed the muscles around her teeth. "Don't you realize that for everything you've written against women—you could say the same—and a hundred times as much—against men?"
"Lookie," I said. "Many years ago, when I was younger and foolish, I wrote a book about a few of the more conspicuous and lethal flaws in our fair nation. The book was some three hundred and seventy pages long. I devoted all but about twenty pages to the calamitous follies of males. Men, as you call them. But I did, for some twenty pages of light blast, violate the ironclad altar of femininity and point out mom's big mouth and little brain, her puffed crop and shaky pins. A few things. I hardly thought I had loaded the dice—inasmuch as half the people are female and I gave females only about a fifteenth of my slightly caustic attention. But ever since that book came out, almost every woman I've met has accused me of outrageously laying the blame for a manifestly hell-bound society on females. In the first place, this is not true. In the second place, such statements—the hundreds I've collected—tend to show that American women positively refuse to take any blame for anything whatever. They have no conscience and no sense of responsibility. They believe themselves to be as spotless as United States senators say they are, in campaign orations. They lack the capacity for admitting guilt. They are nearly all—I have thus found—psychologically far, far, far more destitute than I claimed only certain kinds of them to be."
She laughed. "You're still mad! Someday you'll break down and write a wonderful novel about the woman who really poisoned you against them all."