‘Your husband?’ he cried. ‘You obey your husband? This is most wonderful.’
‘My husband. Yes, Lord Chester, you may now compose that sermon which shall show how Man is the Lord and Master of all created things, including—Woman. I told you I would help you in your sermon. Listen.’
All that day they drove through the fair garden, which we call England. Along the road they passed the rustics hay-making in the fields; the country women were talking at their doors; the country doctor was plodding along her daily round; the parson was jogging along the wayside, umbrella in hand, to call upon her old people; the country police in blue bonnets, carrying their dreaded pocket-books, were loitering in couples about cross-roads; the farmer drove her cart to market, or rode her cob about the fields; little girls and boys carried dinner to their fathers. Here and there they passed a country-seat, a village with its street of cottages, or they clattered through a small sleepy town with its row of villas and its quiet streets, where the men sat working at the windows in hopes of getting a chat or seeing something to break the monotony of the day.
The travellers saw, but noted nothing. For the Professor was teaching her pupil things calculated to startle even the Duchess, and at which Constance would have trembled—things which made his cheek to glow, his eyes to glisten, his mouth to quiver, his hands to clench;—things not to be spoken, not to be whispered, not to be thought, this Professor openly, boldly, and without shame, told the young man.
‘I might have guessed it,’ he said. ‘I had already half guessed it. And this—this is the reason why we are kept in subjection!—this is the LIE they have palmed upon us!’
‘Hush! calm yourself. The thing was not done in a day. The system was not invented by conscious hypocrites and deceivers; it grew, and with it the new religion, the new morality, the new order of things. Blame no one, Lord Chester, but blame the system.’
‘You have told me too much now,’ he said; ‘tell me more.’
She went on. Each word, each new fact, tore something from him that he would have believed part of his nature. Yet he had been prepared for this day by years of training, all designed by this crafty woman to arm him with strength to receive her disclosures.
‘What you see,’ she said, as they drove through a village, ‘seems calm and happy. It is the calmness of repression. Those men in the fields, those working men sitting at the windows—they are all alike unhappy, and they know not why. It is because the natural order has been reversed; the sex which should command and create is compelled to work in blind obedience. You will see, as we go on, that we, who have usurped the power, have created nothing, improved nothing, carried on nothing. It is for you, Lord Chester, to restore the old order.’
‘If I can—if I can find words,’ he stammered.