Part 7
For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue.
Her sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and
for an hour or so the work distracted her altogether from her
troubles.
Then, after Capes had been through her work and had gone on, it
came to her that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to
almost immediate collapse; that in a little while these studies
would cease, and perhaps she would never set eyes on him again.
After that consolations fled.
The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she became
inattentive to the work before her, and it did not get on. She
felt sleepy and unusually irritable. She lunched at a creamery
in Great Portland Street, and as the day was full of wintry
sunshine, spent the rest of the lunch-hour in a drowsy gloom,
which she imagined to be thought upon the problems of her
position, on a seat in Regent's Park. A girl of fifteen or
sixteen gave her a handbill that she regarded as a tract until
she saw "Votes for Women" at the top. That turned her mind to
the more generalized aspects of her perplexities again. She had
never been so disposed to agree that the position of women in the
modern world is intolerable.
Capes joined the students at tea, and displayed himself in an
impish mood that sometimes possessed him. He did not notice that
Ann Veronica was preoccupied and heavy-eyed. Miss Klegg raised
the question of women's suffrage, and he set himself to provoke a
duel between her and Miss Garvice. The youth with the hair
brushed back and the spectacled Scotchman joined in the fray for
and against the women's vote.
Ever and again Capes appealed to Ann Veronica. He liked to draw
her in, and she did her best to talk. But she did not talk
readily, and in order to say something she plunged a little, and
felt she plunged. Capes scored back with an uncompromising vigor
that was his way of complimenting her intelligence. But this
afternoon it discovered an unusual vein of irritability in her.
He had been reading Belfort Bax, and declared himself a convert.
He contrasted the lot of women in general with the lot of men,
presented men as patient, self-immolating martyrs, and women as
the pampered favorites of Nature. A vein of conviction mingled
with his burlesque.
For a time he and Miss Klegg contradicted one another.
The question ceased to be a tea-table talk, and became suddenly
tragically real for Ann Veronica. There he sat, cheerfully
friendly in his sex's freedom--the man she loved, the one man she
cared should unlock the way to the wide world for her imprisoned
feminine possibilities, and he seemed regardless that she stifled
under his eyes; he made a jest of all this passionate insurgence
of the souls of women against the fate of their conditions.
Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same words she
used at every discussion, her contribution to the great question.
She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil
of life--their place was the little world, the home; that their
power lay not in votes but in influence over men and in making
the minds of their children fine and splendid.
"Women should understand men's affairs, perhaps," said Miss
Garvice, "but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power
of influencing they can exercise now."
"There IS something sound in that position," said Capes,
intervening as if to defend Miss Garvice against a possible
attack from Ann Veronica. "It may not be just and so forth, but,
after all, it is how things are. Women are not in the world in
the same sense that men are--fighting individuals in a scramble.
I don't see how they can be. Every home is a little recess, a
niche, out of the world of business and competition, in which
women and the future shelter."
"A little pit!" said Ann Veronica; "a little prison!"
"It's just as often a little refuge. Anyhow, that is how things
are."
"And the man stands as the master at the mouth of the den."
"As sentinel. You forget all the mass of training and tradition
and instinct that go to make him a tolerable master. Nature is a
mother; her sympathies have always been feminist, and she has
tempered the man to the shorn woman."
"I wish," said Ann Veronica, with sudden anger, "that you could
know what it is to live in a pit!"
She stood up as she spoke, and put down her cup beside Miss
Garvice's. She addressed Capes as though she spoke to him alone.
"I can't endure it," she said.
Every one turned to her in astonishment.
She felt she had to go on. "No man can realize," she said, "what
that pit can be. The way--the way we are led on! We are taught
to believe we are free in the world, to think we are queens. . .
. Then we find out. We find out no man will treat a woman fairly
as man to man--no man. He wants you--or he doesn't; and then he
helps some other woman against you. . . . What you say is
probably all true and necessary. . . . But think of the
disillusionment! Except for our sex we have minds like men,
desires like men. We come out into the world, some of us--"
She paused. Her words, as she said them, seemed to her to mean
nothing, and there was so much that struggled for expression.
"Women are mocked," she said. "Whenever they try to take hold of
life a man intervenes."
She felt, with a sudden horror, that she might weep. She wished
she had not stood up. She wondered wildly why she had stood up.
No one spoke, and she was impelled to flounder on. "Think of the
mockery!" she said. "Think how dumb we find ourselves and
stifled! I know we seem to have a sort of freedom. . . . Have
you ever tried to run and jump in petticoats, Mr. Capes? Well,
think what it must be to live in them--soul and mind and body!
It's fun for a man to jest at our position."
"I wasn't jesting," said Capes, abruptly.
She stood face to face with him, and his voice cut across her
speech and made her stop abruptly. She was sore and overstrung,
and it was intolerable to her that he should stand within three
yards of her unsuspectingly, with an incalculably vast power over
her happiness. She was sore with the perplexities of her
preposterous position. She was sick of herself, of her life, of
everything but him; and for him all her masked and hidden being
was crying out.
She stopped abruptly at the sound of his voice, and lost the
thread of what she was saying. In the pause she realized the
attention of the others converged upon her, and that the tears
were brimming over her eyes. She felt a storm of emotion surging
up within her. She became aware of the Scotch student regarding
her with stupendous amazement, a tea-cup poised in one hairy hand
and his faceted glasses showing a various enlargement of segments
of his eye.
The door into the passage offered itself with an irresistible
invitation--the one alternative to a public, inexplicable passion
of weeping.
Capes flashed to an understanding of her intention, sprang to his
feet, and opened the door for her retreat.
