“You women are changing things!”
“We have to, if we’re going to live among men. When you’re in Rome––”
“You’re going to turn the world upside down, I suppose?”
“We’ve always done that more or less, and nobody ever could stop us, from the Garden of Eden on. In the future, one thing is sure: a lot of women will go wrong, as the saying is, under the new conditions, with liberty and their own money and all. But, good Lord! millions of women went wrong in the old days! The first books of the Bible tell about all the kinds of wickedness that we know to-day. Somebody complained that with all our modern science we hadn’t invented one new deadly sin. We go on using the same old seven––well, indecencies. It will be the same with women. It’s bound to be. You can’t keep women unfree. You’ve simply got to let them loose. The old ways were hideous; and it’s dishonest and vicious to pretend that people used to be better than they were, just as an argument in favor of slavery, for fear they will be worse than the imaginary woman they put up for an argument. I fancy women were just about as good and just about as bad in old Turkey, in the jails they call harems, as they are in a three-ringed circus to-day.
“When the old-fashioned woman went wrong she lied or cried or committed suicide or took to the streets or went on with her social success, as the case might be. She’ll go on doing much the same––just as men do. Some men repent, some cheat, some kill themselves; others go right along about their business, whether it’s in a bank, a church, a factory, a city or a village or anywhere.
“But in the new marriage––for marriage is really changing, though the marrying people are the same old folks––in the new marriage a man must do what a woman has had to do all along: take the partner for better or worse and no questions asked.”
He humored her heresy because he found it too insane to reason with. “In other words, we’ll take our women as is.”
“That’s the expression––as is. A man will take his sweetheart ‘as is’ or leave her. And whichever he does, as you always say, oh, she’ll get along somehow.”
“The old-fashioned home goes overboard, then?”