Ordinarily Katherine would have smiled at the ingenuousness of the reply; but this morning her nerves were unstrung.
“I wasn't thinking of him. I was thinking of ourselves—us women.”
“I wonder what he'll be like,” said Felicia.
“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?”
There was a few moments' silence. Katherine went on with her dressing. The words had relieved her heart, yet she felt ashamed at having spoken so bitterly before the young girl. Maxime debetur—. She thought of the maxim and bit her lip. But was she not young too? Were they so far apart in age that they could not meet on common grounds? She looked in the glass. Her charm had not yet gone. Yet she wished she had not spoken.
Felicia finished arranging the flowers, and disposed the four little vases about the room. Then she went up to Katherine and put her arm round her waist.
“I am sorry.”
It was all the girl could say, but it made Katherine turn and kiss her cheek.
“I expect Mr. Chetwynd is going to be very nice if he is anything like his father,” she said in her natural tones. “Forgive me for having been disagreeable. I woke up like it. Sometimes this pension gets on one's nerves.”
“It is frightfully dull,” assented Felicia. “But you are the busiest of anybody. You are always working or reading or going out to nurse poor sick people. I wish I did anything half as useful.”
“Well, you have made me more cheerful than I was, if that is anything,” replied Katherine.
A little later the old man announced to her the speedy arrival of his son Raine. Katherine listened, made a few polite inquiries, learned the functions of a college tutor, and the difference between a lecturer and a professor.
“He is a great big fellow,” said the old man. “He would make about ten of me. So don't expect to see a thin, doubled up, elderly young man in spectacles!”
“Is your son married?” asked Frâulein Klinkhardt, who sat next to Felicia.
She was a fair, florid woman of over thirty, with strongly hewn features and a predisposition for bold effects of attire. The old man, who did not like her, said that her hats were immoral. A glint of gold on one of her front teeth gave a peculiar effect, in the way of suggestion, to her speech.
“He has never told me,” said the old man, with his most courtly smile.
“You will see, she will try to marry him when he comes,” whispered Frau Schultz to Mme. Boccard.
But Frâulein Klinkhardt laughed at the old man's reply.
“That is a pity, for married men—whom one knows to be married—are always more agreeable.”
“And women, too,” said Mme. Popea with a little grimace of satisfaction.
“A bachelor is generally more chivalrous,” said Miss Bunter, who always took things seriously. “He acts more in accordance with his ideals of women.”
“Is Saul also among the prophets?” asked Katherine with a smile, “Miss Bunter among the cynics?”
“Oh, dear! I hope not,” replied Miss Bunter in alarm; “I did not mean that, but a bachelor always seems more romantic. What do you think, Miss Graves?”
“I don't know,” said Felicia, laughing; “I like all men when they are nice, and it doesn't seem to make any difference whether they are married or not. Perhaps it may with very young men,” she added reflectively. “But then very young men are different. For instance, all the young subs in my uncle's regiment; it would seem as ridiculous to call them bachelors as to call me a spinster.”
“But you are a spinster, Miss Graves,” said Miss Bunter, mildly platitudinous.
“Oh, please!—” laughed Felicia. “A spinster is—” she paused in some confusion, “An old maid,” she was going to add, but she remembered it might be a tender point with Miss Bunter. Frau Schultz, however, struck in with her harsh voice,—
“At what age does a woman begin to be a spinster, Miss Graves?”
Frau Schultz's perverted sense of tact was of the quality of genius. Old Mr. Chetwynd came to the rescue of the maiden ladies.
“In England, when their first banns of marriage are published,” he said.
Mme. Boccard turned to Mme. Popea to have the reply translated into French. Then she explained it volubly to the table.
The question at issue, the relative merits of bachelors and married men, was never beaten out; for at this juncture, the meal being over, old Mr. Chetwynd rose, turned, and hobbled out of the room, taking Felicia with him.
An hour later Katherine was picking her way through the mud up the long unsightly street in the old part of the town that leads to the Hotel de Ville. At the ill-kept gateway of a great decayed house, she stopped, and entering, descended the steps at a side doorway beneath to a room on the basement, whose lunette window was on a level with the roadway. A very old woman opened the door to her knock, and welcomed her with an—
“Ah,