Part 4
After a day or so she thought more steadily. She found herself
in a phase of violent reaction against the suffrage movement, a
phase greatly promoted by one of those unreasonable objections
people of Ann Veronica's temperament take at times--to the girl
in the next cell to her own. She was a large, resilient girl,
with a foolish smile, a still more foolish expression of
earnestness, and a throaty contralto voice. She was noisy and
hilarious and enthusiastic, and her hair was always abominably
done. In the chapel she sang with an open-lunged gusto that
silenced Ann Veronica altogether, and in the exercising-yard
slouched round with carelessly dispersed feet. Ann Veronica
decided that "hoydenish ragger" was the only phrase to express
her. She was always breaking rules, whispering asides,
intimating signals. She became at times an embodiment for Ann
Veronica of all that made the suffrage movement defective and
unsatisfying.
She was always initiating petty breaches of discipline. Her
greatest exploit was the howling before the mid-day meal. This
was an imitation of the noises made by the carnivora at the
Zoological Gardens at feeding-time; the idea was taken up by
prisoner after prisoner until the whole place was alive with
barkings, yappings, roarings, pelican chatterings, and feline
yowlings, interspersed with shrieks of hysterical laughter. To
many in that crowded solitude it came as an extraordinary relief.
It was better even than the hymn-singing. But it annoyed Ann
Veronica.
"Idiots!" she said, when she heard this pandemonium, and with
particular reference to this young lady with the throaty
contralto next door. "Intolerable idiots! . . ."
It took some days for this phase to pass, and it left some scars
and something like a decision. "Violence won't do it," said Ann
Veronica. "Begin violence, and the woman goes under. . . .
"But all the rest of our case is right. . . . Yes."
As the long, solitary days wore on, Ann Veronica found a number
of definite attitudes and conclusions in her mind.
One of these was a classification of women into women who are and
women who are not hostile to men. "The real reason why I am out
of place here," she said, "is because I like men. I can talk
with them. I've never found them hostile. I've got no feminine
class feeling. I don't want any laws or freedoms to protect me
from a man like Mr. Capes. I know that in my heart I would take
whatever he gave. . . .
"A woman wants a proper alliance with a man, a man who is better
stuff than herself. She wants that and needs it more than
anything else in the world. It may not be just, it may not be
fair, but things are so. It isn't law, nor custom, nor masculine
violence settled that. It is just how things happen to be. She
wants to be free--she wants to be legally and economically free,
so as not to be subject to the wrong man; but only God, who made
the world, can alter things to prevent her being slave to the
right one.
"And if she can't have the right one?
"We've developed such a quality of preference!"
She rubbed her knuckles into her forehead. "Oh, but life is
difficult!" she groaned. "When you loosen the tangle in one
place you tie a knot in another. . . . Before there is any
change, any real change, I shall be dead--dead--dead and
finished--two hundred years! . . ."
