Miss Alimony, who was wearing an enormous hat with three nodding ostrich feathers, a purple bow, a gold buckle and numerous minor ornaments of various origin and substance, said they had all of them listened with the greatest appreciation and sympathy to the speech of their hostess. Their hostess was a newcomer to the movement, she knew she might say this without offence, and was passing through a phase, an early phase, through which many of them had passed. This was the phase of trying to take a reasonable view of an unreasonable situation. (Applause.) Their hostess had spoken of science, and no doubt science was a great thing; but there was something greater than science, and that was the ideal. It was woman's place to idealize. Sooner or later their hostess would discover, as they had all discovered, that it was not to science but the ideal that women must look for freedom. Consider, she said, the scientific men of to-day. Consider, for example, Sir James Crichton-Browne, the physiologist. Was he on their side? On the contrary, he said the most unpleasant things about them on every occasion. He went out of his way to say them. Or consider Sir Almroth Wright, did he speak well of women? Or Sir Ray Lankester, the biologist, who was the chief ornament of the Anti-Suffrage Society. Or Sir Roderick Dover, the physicist, who—forgetting Madame Curie, a far more celebrated physicist than himself, she ventured to say (Applause.) had recently gone outside his province altogether to abuse feminine research. There were your scientific men. Mrs. Trafford had said their anti-census campaign would annoy scientific men; well, under the circumstances, she wanted to annoy scientific men. (Applause.) She wanted to annoy everybody. Until women got the vote (loud applause) the more annoying they were the better. When the whole world was impressed by the idea that voteless women were an intolerable nuisance, then there would cease to be voteless women. (Enthusiasm.) Mr. Asquith had said—
And so on for quite a long time....
Buzard rose out of waves of subsiding emotion. Buzard was a slender, long-necked, stalk-shaped man with gilt glasses, uneasy movements and a hypersensitive manner. He didn't so much speak as thrill with thought vibrations; he spoke like an entranced but still quite gentlemanly sibyl. After Agatha's deep trumpet calls, he sounded like a solo on the piccolo. He picked out all his more important words with a little stress as though he gave them capitals. He said their hostess's remarks had set him thinking. He thought it was possible to stew the Scientific Argument in its own Juice. There was something he might call the Factuarial Estimate of Values. Well, it was a High Factuarial Value on their side, in his opinion at any rate, when Anthropologists came and told him that the Primitive Human Society was a Matriarchate. ("But it wasn't!" said Trafford to himself.) It had a High Factuarial Value when they assured him that Every One of the Great Primitive Inventions was made by a Woman, and that it was to Women they owed Fire and the early Epics and Sagas. ("Good Lord!" said Trafford.) It had a High Factuarial Value when they not only asserted but proved that for Thousands of Years, and perhaps for Hundreds of Thousands of Years, Women had been in possession of Articulate Speech before men rose to that Level of Intelligence....
It occurred suddenly to Trafford that he could go now; that it would be better to go; that indeed he must go; it was no doubt necessary that his mind should have to work in the same world as Buzard's mental processes, but at any rate those two sets of unsympathetic functions need not go on in the same room. Something might give way. He got up, and with those elaborate efforts to be silent that lead to the violent upsetting of chairs, got himself out of the room and into the passage, and was at once rescued by the sympathetic cook-general, in her most generalized form, and given fresh tea in his study—which impressed him as being catastrophically disarranged....
§ 4
When Marjorie was at last alone with him she found him in a state of extreme mental stimulation. "Your speech," he said, "was all right. I didn't know you could speak like that, Marjorie. But it soared like the dove above the waters. Waters! I never heard such a flood of rubbish.... You know, it's a mistake to mass women. It brings out something silly.... It affected Buzard as badly as any one. The extraordinary thing is they have a case, if only they'd be quiet. Why did you get them together?"
"It's our local branch."
"Yes, but why?"
"Well, if they talk about things—Discussions like this clear up their minds."
"Discussion! It wasn't discussion."
"Oh! it was a beginning."
"Chatter of that sort isn't the beginning of discussion, it's the end. It's the death-rattle. Nobody was meeting the thoughts of any one. I admit Buzard, who's a man, talked the worst rubbish of all. That Primitive Matriarchate of his! So it isn't sex. I've noticed before that the men in this movement of yours are worse than the women. It isn't sex. It's something else. It's a foolishness. It's a sort of irresponsible looseness." He turned on her gravely. "You ought not to get all these people here. It's contagious. Before you know it you'll find your own mind liquefy and become enthusiastic and slop about. You'll begin to talk monomania about Mr. Asquith."
"But it's a great movement, Rag, even if incidentally they say and do silly things!"
"My dear! aren't I feminist? Don't I want women fine and sane and responsible? Don't I want them to have education, to handle things, to vote like men and bear themselves with the gravity of men? And these meetings—all hat and flutter! These displays of weak, untrained, hysterical vehemence! These gatherings of open-mouthed impressionable young girls to be trained in incoherence! You can't go on with it!"
Marjorie regarded him quietly for a moment. "I must go on with something," she said.
"Well, not this."
"Then what?"
"Something sane."
"Tell me what."
"It must come out of yourself."
Marjorie thought sullenly for a moment. "Nothing comes out of myself," she said.
"I don't think you realize a bit what my life has become," she went on; "how much I'm like some one who's been put in a pleasant, high-class prison."
"This house! It's your own!"
"It doesn't give me an hour's mental occupation in the day. It's all very well to say I might do more in it. I can't—without absurdity. Or expenditure. I can't send the girl away and start scrubbing. I can't make jam or do ornamental needlework. The shops do it better and cheaper, and I haven't been trained to it. I've been trained not to do it. I've been brought up on games and school-books, and fed on mixed ideas. I can't sit down and pacify myself with a needle as women used to do. Besides, I not only detest doing needlework but I hate it—the sort of thing a woman of my kind does anyhow—when it's done. I'm no artist. I'm not sufficiently interested in outside things to spend my time in serious systematic reading, and after four or five novels—oh, these meetings are better than that! You see, you've got a life—too much of it—I haven't got enough. I wish almost I could sleep away half the day. Oh! I want something real, Rag; something more than I've got." A sudden inspiration came to her. "Will you let me come to your laboratory and work with you?"