“We are the species,” said Miss Miniver, “men are only incidents. They give themselves airs, but so it is. In all the species of animals the females are more important than the males; the males have to please them. Look at the cock’s feathers, look at the competition there is everywhere, except among humans. The stags and oxen and things all have to fight for us, everywhere. Only in man is the male made the most important. And that happens through our maternity; it’s our very importance that degrades us.
“While we were minding the children they stole our rights and liberties. The children made us slaves, and the men took advantage of it. It’s – Mrs. Shalford says – the accidental conquering the essential. Originally in the first animals there were no males, none at all. It has been proved. Then they appear among the lower things” – she made meticulous gestures to figure the scale of life; she seemed to be holding up specimens, and peering through her glasses at them – “among crustaceans and things, just as little creatures, ever so inferior to the females. Mere hangers on. Things you would laugh at. And among human beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and leaders; they owned all the property, they invented all the arts.
“The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate! The Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were told.”
“But is that really so?” said Ann Veronica.
“It has been proved,” said Miss Miniver, and added, “by American professors.”
“But how did they prove it?”
“By science,” said Miss Miniver, and hurried on, putting out a rhetorical hand that showed a slash of finger through its glove. “And now, look at us! See what we have become. Toys! Delicate trifles! A sex of invalids. It is we who have become the parasites and toys.”
It was, Ann Veronica felt, at once absurd and extraordinarily right. Hetty, who had periods of lucid expression, put the thing for her from her pillow. She charged boldly into the space of Miss Miniver’s rhetorical pause.
“It isn’t quite that we’re toys. Nobody toys with me. Nobody regards Constance or Vee as a delicate trifle.”
Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some remark was assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried hastily under a cough.
“They’d better not,” said Hetty. “The point is we’re not toys, toys isn’t the word; we’re litter. We’re handfuls. We’re regarded as inflammable litter that mustn’t be left about. We are the species, and maternity is our game; that’s all right, but nobody wants that admitted for fear we should all catch fire, and set about fulfilling the purpose of our beings without waiting for further explanations. As if we didn’t know! The practical trouble is our ages. They used to marry us off at seventeen, rush us into things before we had time to protest. They don’t now. Heaven knows why! They don’t marry most of us off now until high up in the twenties. And the age gets higher. We have to hang about in the interval. There’s a great gulf opened, and nobody’s got any plans what to do with us. So the world is choked with waste and waiting daughters. Hanging about! And they start thinking and asking questions, and begin to be neither one thing nor the other. We’re partly human beings and partly females in suspense.”
Miss Miniver followed with an expression of perplexity, her mouth shaped to futile expositions. The Widgett method of thought puzzled her weakly rhetorical mind. “There is no remedy, girls,” she began, breathlessly, “except the Vote. Give us that – ”
Ann Veronica came in with a certain disregard of Miss Miniver. “That’s it,” she said. “They have no plans for us. They have no ideas what to do with us.”
“Except,” said Constance, surveying her work with her head on one side, “to keep the matches from the litter.”
“And they won’t let us make plans for ourselves.”
“We will,” said Miss Miniver, refusing to be suppressed, “if some of us have to be killed to get it.” And she pressed her lips together in white resolution and nodded, and she was manifestly full of that same passion for conflict and self-sacrifice that has given the world martyrs since the beginning of things. “I wish I could make every woman, every girl, see this as clearly as I see it – just what the Vote means to us. Just what it means…”
Part 2
As Ann Veronica went back along the Avenue to her aunt she became aware of a light-footed pursuer running. Teddy overtook her, a little out of breath, his innocent face flushed, his straw-colored hair disordered. He was out of breath, and spoke in broken sentences.
“I say, Vee. Half a minute, Vee. It’s like this: You want freedom. Look here. You know – if you want freedom. Just an idea of mine. You know how those Russian students do? In Russia. Just a formal marriage. Mere formality. Liberates the girl from parental control. See? You marry me. Simply. No further responsibility whatever. Without hindrance – present occupation. Why not? Quite willing. Get a license – just an idea of mine. Doesn’t matter a bit to me. Do anything to please you, Vee. Anything. Not fit to be dust on your boots. Still – there you are!”
He paused.
Ann Veronica’s desire to laugh unrestrainedly was checked by the tremendous earnestness of his expression. “Awfully good of you, Teddy.” she said.
He nodded silently, too full for words.
“But I don’t see,” said Ann Veronica, “just how it fits the present situation.”
“No! Well, I just suggested it. Threw it out. Of course, if at any time – see reason – alter your opinion. Always at your service. No offence, I hope. All right! I’m off. Due to play hockey. Jackson’s. Horrid snorters! So long, Vee! Just suggested it. See? Nothing really. Passing thought.”
“Teddy,” said Ann Veronica, “you’re a dear!”
“Oh, quite!” said Teddy, convulsively, and lifted an imaginary hat and left her.
Part 3
The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at first much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a plaster statue of Mr. Gladstone would have to a carelessly displayed interior on a dissecting-room table. The Widgetts talked with a remarkable absence of external coverings; the Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on its surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica’s wrappered world. The Widgett mental furniture was perhaps worn and shabby, but there it was before you, undisguised, fading visibly in an almost pitiless sunlight. Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a knight who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was of good seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and distantly related to Aunt Mollie’s deceased curate. She was the social leader of Morningside Park, and in her superficial and euphuistic way an extremely kind and pleasant woman. With her lived a Mrs. Pramlay, a sister of the Morningside Park doctor, and a very active and useful member of the Committee of the Impoverished Gentlewomen’s Aid Society. Both ladies were on easy and friendly terms with all that was best in Morningside Park society; they had an afternoon once a month that was quite well attended, they sometimes gave musical evenings, they dined out and gave a finish to people’s dinners, they had a full-sized croquet lawn and tennis beyond, and understood the art of bringing people together. And they never talked of anything at all, never discussed, never even encouraged gossip. They were just nice.
Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the Avenue that had just been the scene of her first proposal beside her aunt, and speculating for the first time in her life about that lady’s mental attitudes. Her prevailing effect was one of quiet and complete assurance, as though she knew all about everything, and was only restrained by her instinctive delicacy from telling what she knew. But the restraint exercised by her instinctive delicacy was very great; over and above coarse or sexual matters it covered religion and politics