"I liked it all first-rate. Julie is a smart girl, I tell you."
Mère scented his evasion, and she would never tolerate evasions. She repeated:
"What didn't you like about it?"
"I liked all I could understand."
"Understand!" snapped Mère, who rarely wasted her culture on Pop. "What didn't you understand? Could anything be clearer than this? Listen!" She read in an oratorical voice:
"'Woman has been for ages man's mere beast of burden, his household drudge. Being a wife has meant being a slave—the only servant without wages or holiday. But the woman of to-day at last demands that the shackles be stricken off; she demands freedom to live her life her own way—to express her selfhood without the hampering restrictions imposed on her by the barbaric customs inherited from the time of the cave-man.'"
Mère folded up the clipping and glared defiance at the cave-man slumped in the uneasy chair.
"What's clearer than that?" she reiterated.
Pop was at bay. He was like a desperate rabbit. He answered:
"It's clear enough, I guess; but it's more than I can take in. Seems to me the women folks are hollering at the men folks to give 'em what the men folks have never been able to get for themselves."