“What does it matter?” said Thalia, which was precisely what I should have expected her to say. What does it matter? Why should the average woman excite herself so greatly about this particularly small thing? How does it bear upon the interest or the attractiveness or the value of any woman to know precisely how many years she counts between thirty and forty, at all events to another of her sex? Yet to the average woman it seems to be the all-important fact, the first thing she must know. She is enragée to find it out, she will make the most cunning enquiries and take the most subtle means. Much as I appreciate the average woman, I have in this respect no patience with her. It is as if she would measure the pretensions of all others by recognized rule of thumb with a view to discovering the surplus claim and properly scoring it down. It is surely a survival from days when we were much more feminine than we are now; but it is still very general, even among married ladies, for whom, really, the question might have an exhausted interest.
“What does it matter?” said Thalia. “I see your fuchsias, like me, have taken advantage of a fine day to come out. What a lot you’ve got!”
“Yes,” I said, without enthusiasm, “they were here when we came.”
“Oh, don’t you like them?” exclaimed the Average Woman, “I think the fuchsia such a graceful, pretty flower.”
“It is graceful and it is pretty,” I assented. There are any number of fuchsias, as Thalia said, standing in rows along the paling under the potato-creeper; the last occupant must have adored them. They remain precisely in the pots in which they were originally cherished. Knowing that the first thing I do for a flower I like is to put it in the ground where it has room to move its feet and stir about at night, and take its share in the joys of the community, Tiglath-Pileser says compassionately of the fuchsia, “It is permitted to occupy a pot;” but I notice that he does not select it for his button-hole notwithstanding.
Thalia looked at me suspiciously. “What have you got against it?” she demanded, and the Average Woman chorussed, “Now tell us.”
I fixed a fuchsia sternly with my eye. “It’s an affected thing,” I said. “Always looking down. I think modesty can be an overrated virtue in a flower. It is also like a ballet-dancer, flaunting short petticoats, which doesn’t go with modesty at all. I like a flower to be sincere; there is no heart, no affection, no sentiment about a fuchsia.”
Thalia listened to this diatribe with her head a little on one side.
“You are full of prejudices,” said she, “but there is something in this one. Nobody could say ‘My love is like a fuchsia.’”
“It depends,” I said; “there are ladies not a hundred miles from here who thrill when they are told that they walk like the partridge and shine like the moon. I shouldn’t care about it myself.”