"Did I hear you talking, Brown?"
"I can't say, ma'am," he answered stolidly. She frowned.
"Be good enough not to equivocate," she commanded. "Were you talking?"
"I often talk aloud to myself," said Henry mildly. He was an honest man and did not take kindly to lies, even of the whitest. Mrs. Peters frowned again.
"Indeed!" she said icily. "Do you mean to say you were not talking to a young woman through the hedge?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Henry, "I was. I suppose I'm allowed to rest for a minute now and then."
"Rest is a very different thing from philandering. That I can not allow. It looks very bad from the road to see the vicarage servants gossiping or worse through the hedge. Remember, Brown, it must not happen again. I can not understand one of our village girls——"
She paused interrogatively, but Henry was not so silly as to fall into the trap. He began to oil the machine, and even Mrs. Peters did not like to ask pointblank who his sweetheart was. Instead, she finished with a snap, "—making herself so cheap."
She went back to the house again. Henry straightened up and glared after her. "They're all alike!" he said again; but how he could include two such different people as Mrs. Peters and his adored in the same condemnation is hard to understand. The words of the sentence, it is true, were identical; but the inflection hinted at a great gulf fixed between the two offenders. Possibly they were charged with different offenses.
"They're all alike...." Are they? Does the same essential lurk beneath the surface? Supposing we could dissect Mrs. Peters, Alicia, Mizzi, Beatrice Blair, and a thousand Ermyntrudes or Sallies, should we find the same germ of woman? Take Lionel's evidence, if it were available. You might safely assert that to him Beatrice was different from and superior to any other woman you could produce. Henry Brown would as stoutly hold the same of his anonymous sweetheart. Mr. Peters and Mr. Hedderwick we may hope would take an identical line, or at least they would have once. But these are, or have been, lovers, the blindest of mortals, and their evidence is too partial to be trustworthy. A cynic like Pope would tell you that every woman is at heart a rake, and might find a score of others to support him. A Shaw might produce a monster like Ann Whitfield and brazenly say she was typical. A Chesterton would talk of women being sublime as individuals but horrible in a herd. A son might say that his mother was perfect, but he, too, would be partial. What is the truth about woman? Only a woman can say, and she would find it hard to take a detached view. Probably truth was partly expressed by the odd-job man in words—wholly expressed by his words and inflection. They are human and feminine if you probe deep enough, but there are variations, unimagined harmonies and discords for the seeker. "They're all alike"—with a difference, and no man can learn the whole truth from a text-book. The text-book can give him elementary rules which may serve him well, but he must be prepared to find plenty of exceptions. The student, however, need not fear monotony.