“Wives of great men most remind us that they talked all of the time, and departing left behind them words that were not worth a dime. Isn’t that what one of your own American poets said? Sounds something like it, anyway.
“But you wanted to know just why I never married. Well, it was because of these nasty flings at women by the men that I’ve just been speaking of. If they say such things before marriage, what won’t they say after? They’re always talking about women’s curiosity, starting with Eve and the apple. I suppose if there had been a Saturday Eden Post, Adam would have written alleged jokes about it or run a funny department called ‘Musings of a Married Man.’ I blame that Eve and her apple story for this eternal joshing about feminine curiosity. You needn’t look surprised, young man. I’m talking twentieth not sixteenth century language these days, and since yours is a family newspaper probably it’s just as well that I am. When I was queen you’d have thought the English language consisted principally of proper nouns and improper adjectives. We called a spade a spade, and then some. If a lady disliked a gentleman she didn’t say he was a mean old thing. She began by calling him a diabolical blackguard and horse thief, and then gradually grew abusive.
“Woman’s curiosity! All the census-takers and private detectives and professional Paul Pry’s who stick their noses into other people’s businesses are men. So are all the explorers, the individuals who are so curious to find out what’s going on at the other end of the earth that they can’t content themselves at home. If, in the history of the world, a woman has ever been seized by an overwhelming desire to see what the North Pole looks like, she has cleverly concealed the fact. While the men were organizing North Pole and South Pole expeditions, and relief expeditions, and expeditions to rescue the relief expeditions, the wives and mothers remained patiently on the job at home. And when the missing discoverers came back covered with hero medals, and suffering from chilblains, and writer’s cramp, and lecturer’s sore throat, and coupon-clipper’s thumb, the women never asked why heroine medals seem so scarce these days. Talk about curiosity! There’s a universal inquiry which is being put by some man to some woman in some part of the world at every second of every minute of the twenty-four hours, and it is this: ‘What did you do with that LAST money I gave you?’ There it is again, that insatiable curiosity of man which will not let him rest. Man is a perambulating question mark, the personification of the rising inflection, a chronic case of interrogationitis. And he has the nerve to talk about woman’s curiosity!”
“How about Sir Walter Raleigh?”
“Ah, young man, there are exceptions to every rule, and a woman is generally willing to take an exception. Walter was an awfully nice fellow, at first, but I was dreadfully disappointed in him. Do you know, that business of the velvet cloak and the mud puddle was only what you would call a grandstand play? I found out later. It was his last winter’s cloak, and he was just on his way to the Charing Cross rummage sale to give it away, when he happened to meet me. I know it’s so, because I got it straight at the meeting of the Westminster Sewing Society from the Countess of Leicester’s sister-in-law, who said she was told by the cousin of a woman who knew an intimate friend of a friend of Walter Raleigh’s aunt. And she said he actually laughed about it afterward!
“Do you wonder I stayed single? Perhaps I’ve said too much already, but one word more and I am finished. Do you know, young man, why women say marriage is a lottery? It is because they draw most of the blanks.”
Subdued, but with a sigh of relief, I withdrew hastily from the royal presence, feeling that “man’s inhumanity to man” wouldn’t be a marker to what would have happened to Queen Elizabeth’s husband.
III
JOHN PAUL JONES AND A GROGLESS NAVY
“Interview your great-uncle and find out what he thinks of our modern navy,” said the city editor.