"It doesn't matter," he said. "The main thing is that the present uplift does not go half far enough. Just consider the semi-detached family house. Can anything be more depressing? There are happy families; of them we need not speak. There are unhappy families; but there at least you find the dignity of tragedy, of fierce hatreds, of clamour, of hot blood running riot in the exultation of excess—Swinburne, you know, Dolores, Faustina, Matisse, and all that. But a semi-detached family, a home of chilly rancours and hidden sneers, too indifferent for love, too cowardly for hate, a stagnant pool of misery—can you blame me?"
"I do not," I said. "Far be it from me to censure the natural antipathy for real estate agents which surges up—"
"Thank you," he said. "That is all I wish to know." He rose, but turned back at the door. "Of course," he said, "there is the other side of the picture. Not all nature is degenerate. There are upright pianos. There are well-balanced sentences. There are reinforced-concrete engineers. I thank you for your courtesy." And he went out.
I had no scruples in directing my visitor to the third floor from mine on the right, because that room is occupied by the anti-suffragist member of the staff. Between editions he reads the foreign exchanges with a fixed sneer and polishes up his little anti-feminist aphorisms. These he recites to me with a venomous hatred which Charlotte Perkins Gilman would have no trouble in tracing back to the polygamous cave man. He came in now and sat down in the chair just vacated by my somewhat eccentric visitor.
"Mrs. Pankhurst," he said, "is completely justified in asserting that the leaders may perish, but the good fight will go on. There are plenty of frenzied Englishwomen to carry the torch. The practice of arson, you will observe, comes natural to woman as the historic guardian of the domestic fire. We have great difficulty in preventing our cook from pouring kerosene into the kitchen range. Instinct, you see."
"But look at the other side of the question," I said.
"That doesn't concern me in the least," he replied. "Of course you will say there is the hunger strike. But what does that prove? Simply that another ancient custom of the submerged classes has become an amusement of the well-to-do. We are all copying the underworld nowadays. We have borrowed their delightfully straightforward mode of speech. We have learned their dances. We are imitating their manners. Now we are acquiring their capacity for going without food. Not that I think the hunger-strike is altogether a futile invention. Practised on a large scale it will undeniably exercise a beneficent influence on the status of woman. Modern fashions in women's garments have already reduced the expenditure on dress material to an insignificant minimum. When the wives of the middle and upper classes have learned to be as abstemious with food as they are with clothes, it is plain that the economic independence of women will be close at hand."
"You are assuming that the sheath-gown is less expensive than the crinoline," I managed to interject.
"I consider your remarks utterly irrelevant to my argument," he said. "Mind you, I don't deny that forcible feeding is a disgusting business as it is carried on at present. But that is because it is being misdirected. If the British Government were to apply forcible feeding in Whitechapel and among the human wreckage that litters the Thames Embankment, I am confident that the problem of social unrest would be speedily disposed of."
He, too, turned back at the door.