McGregor looked at him gravely. “I don't know,” he said. “Go on and tell me about the children.”
“I said they were the last things to cling to. They are. We used to have religion. But that's pretty well gone now—the old kind. Now men think about children, I mean a certain kind of men—the ones that have work they want to get on with. Children and work are the only things that kind care about. If they have a sentiment about women it's only about their own—the one they have in the house with them. They want to keep that one finer than they are themselves. So they work the other feeling out on the paid women.
“Women fuss about men loving children. Much they care. It's only a plan for demanding adulation for themselves that they don't earn. Once, when I first came to the city, I took a place as servant in a wealthy family. I wanted to stay under cover until my beard grew. Women used to come there to receptions and to meetings in the afternoon to talk about reforms they were interested in——Bah! They work and scheme trying to get at men. They are at it all their lives, flattering, diverting us, giving us false ideas, pretending to be weak and uncertain when they are strong and determined. They have no mercy. They wage war on us trying to make us slaves. They want to take us captive home to their houses as Caesar took captives home to Rome.
“You look here!” He jumped to his feet again and shook his fingers at McGregor. “You just try something. You try being open and frank and square with a woman—any woman—as you would with a man. Let her live her own life and ask her to let you live yours. You try it. She won't. She will die first.”
He sat down again upon the bench and shook his head back and forth. “Lord how I wish I could talk!” he said. “I'm making a muddle of this and I wanted to tell you. Oh, how I wanted to tell you! It's part of my idea that a man should tell a boy all he knows. We've got to quit lying to them.”
McGregor looked at the ground. He was profoundly and deeply moved and interested as he had never before been moved by anything but hate.
Two women coming along the gravel walk stopped under a tree and looked back. The barber smiled and raised his hat. When they smiled back at him he rose and started toward them. “Come on boy,” he whispered behind his hand to McGregor. “Let's get them.”
When McGregor looked up the scene before his eyes infuriated him. The smiling barber with his hat in his hand, the two women waiting under the tree, the look of half-guilty innocence on the faces of all of them, stirred a blind fury in his brain. He sprang forward, clutching the shoulder of Turner with his hand. Whirling him about he threw him to his hands and knees. “Get out of here you females!” he roared at the women who ran off in terror down the walk.
The barber sat again upon the bench beside McGregor. He rubbed his hands together to brush the bits of gravel out of the flesh. “What's got wrong with you?” he asked.
McGregor hesitated. He wondered how he should tell what was in his mind. “Everything in its place,” he said finally. “I wanted to go on with our talk.”