“Not your business, but your pleasure,” suggested the suffragette.
The priest stiffened.
“I wish you had not hardened your heart against my help,” he said. “Believe me, I have every sympathy with a young and unprotected woman in your position. I think sometimes life seems hard on the weaker sex, yerce, yerce.”
“It is a great honour to be a woman,” said the suffragette. “Your God certainly turns his back on the individual, but he is very just to the mass. The day of women is just dawning.”
“There may be something in what you say,” observed the priest, feeling that she was somehow erasing all that he had meant to say. “I am sure we shall all be glad to see Woman come into her own. But....”
“Men may possess the past, but women have the future,” continued the suffragette, who was certainly very much excited. “We have suddenly found what you have lost—the courage of our convictions. The art of being a fanatic seems to me to be the pivot of progress; but men have lost, and women have caught that blessed disease.”
“I do not see how all this applies to the matter in hand,” said the priest. “Unless you are trying to convey to me, by way of an excuse, the craving which I am told possesses most women of your persuasion—the craving for fame, the morbid wish to be talked about.”
“I did not hope to convey anything at all to you. And certainly not fame, for there is no such thing. I have seen pigeons sitting on the heads of statues of great men in London, and I have seen little critics sitting on their fame. This is a world of isolated people, and there can be no fame where there is no mutual understanding.”
“You are oddly pessimistic, and you are also wilfully evading the point. When I saw you just now, I hoped that you had repented of your sin and needed my help.”
“I have committed no sin that would appeal to you,” said the suffragette. “But that is, of course, beside the point. What you want is that I should repent of being myself, and become a sort of inferior female you.”