“What does it matter? He will be a man.”
“Oh, it does matter. If he is not nice—”
“My dear child,” said Katherine, wheeling round, “it does not signify whether he has the face of an ogre and the manners of a bear. He will be a man; and it is a man that we want among us!”
The girl shrank away. To look upon mankind as necessary elements in life had never before occurred to her. She would have been quite as excited if a nice girl had been expected at the pension.
“But surely—” she stammered.
Katherine divined her thought; but she was too much under the power of her mood to laugh it away.
“No!” she cried, with a scorn that she felt to be unjust—and that very consciousness made her accent more passionate.
“We don't want a man to come so that one of us can marry him by force! God forbid! Most of us have had enough of marrying and giving in marriage. Heaven help me, I am not as bad as that yet, to throw myself into the arms of the first man who came, so that he could carry me away from this Aceldama. But we want a man here to make us feel ashamed of the meannesses and pettinesses that we women display before each other, and to make us hide them, and appear before each other as creatures to respect. Women are the lesser race; we cannot exist by ourselves; we become flaccid and backboneless and small—oh, so small and feeble! I get to despise my sex, to think there is nothing, nothing in us; no reserve of strength, nothing but a mass of nerves and soft, flabby flesh. Oh, my dear child, you don't know it yet—let us hope you never will know it—this craving for a man, the self-contempt of it, to crave for nothing more but just to touch the hem of his garment to work the miracle of restoring you to the dignity of your womanhood. Ah!”
She waved her arms in a passionate gesture and walked about the room with clenched hands. Felicia arranged the flowers mechanically. These things were new to her philosophy. She felt troubled by them, but she kept silent. Katherine continued her parable, the pent-up disgusts and wearinesses of months finding vehement expression.
“Yes, a man, a man. It is good that he is coming. A being without jangling nerves, and with a fresh, broad mind that only sees things in bulk and does not dissect the infinitely little. He will come here like a sea breeze. It is a physical need among us, a man's presence now and then, with his heavy frame and deep voice and resonant laugh, his strength, his rough ways, his heavy tread, his great hands. Ah! you are young; you think I am telling you dreadful things; you may never know it. It is only women who live alone that can know what it is to yearn to have a man's strong arm, brother or father or husband, to close round you as you cry your poor weak woman's heart out, and the more humble, self-abasing longing, just to long for a man's voice. What does it matter what the man is like?”