“Oliver is quicker than I am,” said Cornelia, whose generalizations on the virtues rest largely on observation of her own family, “but Dorothy is quicker than her brother; and I am quicker than you are. Yes, I think you are right. Girls are quicker. But quickness isn’t very important in itself. The important thing is to know where one is going.”
“Girls show,” I proceeded, “very many of them, what the advocates of mental tests recognize as officer quality. I suspect that, if the draft were made universal, and if the army tests were applied to all the women in the country, not only would the disgrace of our moron percentage be greatly abated, but ninety-nine per cent of the men would be obliged to serve in the ranks. Among women, there is an immediacy of reaction to stimuli, a freedom from dubitation, subordinate considerations, and inhibiting afterthoughts, which make them invaluable members of a General Staff, when the General Staff is infested with doubting Thomases, Hamlets, and authorities on red tape.”
“If you think that,” inquired Cornelia, “why don’t you, and why doesn’t Oliver, give more attention to what I tell him is right?”
“Because,” I replied, “we are harassed by subordinate considerations and afterthoughts. But that is just what makes women want to get their hands on things and manage them. I am astounded every day to discover in how many big businesses and even political organizations there is some woman, who has perhaps risen from a stenographic position, sitting in with the chiefs of the concern at the centre of the web and actually telling the ‘big wigs’ what to do—actually ruling the whirlwind and directing the storm.”
After this speech, I glanced at Cornelia to see whether she would admit to herself her own master passion, her suppressed desire. I could see that she was doing something which she ordinarily would no more think of doing in my presence than of doing up her hair: she was reflecting.
“Possibly,” she conceded.
“Not possibly,” I pursued, “but certainly. All women crave mastery, beginning with the government of their own husbands; and their happiness, after the first feigning delight of amorous surrender, is to extend their jurisdiction, to enlarge the limits of their empire. It is the quality that makes queens. It is the quality that made Elizabeth and not Burleigh the ruler of England, and Catherine, not her minister,—whoever he was,—ruler of all the Russias. It is a quality which you yourself possess, my dear Cornelia, in abundance, only you haven’t an adequate throne to display it on; and so, instead of sending Raleigh to South America for galleons of treasure or telling the president of your company which railroad to buy next, you have to take it out in sending Oliver back to the city in disgrace because he has had Dorothy’s hair bobbed.”
“How I hate him!” cried Cornelia, as if still nursing the bitterness of defeat.
“Really?” I asked, in a momentary flutter of hope.
“But if queens feel as miserable as I do,” she added, “since I have had to discipline him, I don’t wish to be a queen.”