“No,” Miss Longfellow readily agreed. “We don't like the New Woman over here. Perhaps Mr. Beechtree admires her though.”
“The New Woman?” Henry doubtfully queried. “Is there a new woman? I don't know the phrase, except from old Victorian Punch Pictures.... Thank you, yes; a little cherry brandy.”
“Ah, is the woman question, then, over in your country—died out? Fought to a finish, perhaps, with honours to the victorious sex?”
“The woman question, sir? What woman question? I know no more of woman questions than of man questions, I am afraid. There is an infinity of questions you may ask about all human beings. People ask them all the time. Personally, I don't; it is less trouble not to. There people are; you can take them or leave them, for what they're worth. Why ask questions about them? There is never a satisfactory answer.”
“A rather difficult youth to talk to,” the ex-cardinal reflected. “He fails to follow up, or, apparently, even to understand, any of the usual conversational gambits. Is he very ignorant, or merely perverse?”
As to Miss Longfellow, she gave Henry up as being not quite all there, and anyhow a bloodless kind of creature, who took very little notice of her. So she went indoors and played the piano.
“I am failing,” thought Henry. “She does not like me. I am not being intelligent. They will talk of things above my head, things I cannot understand.”
Apathy held him, drinking cherry brandy under the moon, and he could not care. Woman question? Man question? What was all this prating?