of the conditions of her sex, with which was closely associated the improved conditions of the race.
It is a surprising, and would be a gratifying, fact, were it not for a feeling that it ought to be the other way about, that men are usually more ready to help a woman in her fight for the good of her sex than persons of the sex she is working for. Men shake off prejudices more readily than women, because their training and mode of life gives them a broader outlook. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. The narrow-minded man is, if more rare, considerably more contracted in his outlook than even the narrow-minded woman.
John Musgrave’s view was certainly contracted; but Mrs Chadwick, in her sanguine moments, entertained the belief that the restricted line of his horizon was due to the accident of circumstances, rather than to a natural deficiency in breadth, and held hopes of a possible development of his view. She did not tell him this; but she confided her belief to Mrs Sommers, who was as sceptical of John’s development as she was of the profitable results of Mrs Chadwick’s enterprises.
Mrs Chadwick told John Musgrave something else, which she deemed of greater importance even than the development of his mind, something which so scandalised Mr Musgrave as to render him speechless, amazed at her audacity, her want of delicacy; and too utterly dumbfounded to defend himself. She informed him, quite seriously, and without any effort to conceal her meaning, that he was not doing his duty by the State.
She had been in Moresby a week when she made this astounding attack, and the occasion which she chose for making it was one morning when she was returning with her host from an inspection of the village school, which, in a moment of weakness, he had suggested might interest her.
The school did interest her; but the sight of John Musgrave surrounded in the infants’ classroom with a number of greedy, unabashed babies, who felt in his pockets for sweets with a confidence that suggested familiarity with the practice, interested her far more. On the homeward walk she informed him that patronising other people’s babies, while undoubtedly commendable, was not his business in life; that he was not a good citizen, because, from purely selfish motives, he was neglecting his most important duty to the State.
John Musgrave was so embarrassed, and so annoyed, that during the rest of the walk, which fortunately was not of long duration, he could not utter a word. He turned in at his own gate in a seriously displeased frame of mind; and Mrs Chadwick, feeling guilty but unrepentant, preceded him up the path with the wickedest of little smiles playing about her lips.
“Thank you so much, Mr Musgrave,” she said, as they parted in the hall, “for a really enjoyable morning.”
Then she went upstairs to her room, and later she recounted for Belle’s edification the result of her visit to the school.
Mrs Sommers was amused; but she experienced a slight compassion for her brother, who would feel, she realised, as startled at a woman approaching a man on such a subject as he would be averse to the subject itself. People in Moresby left the laws of life alone.
John Musgrave was, as a matter of fact, deeply disgusted. He resented, not only the indelicacy, but the impertinence of this interference with the individual. He summarised the proceeding as a display of bad taste. Nevertheless the idea, once presented to him, was not easily dislodged from his brain. Somehow he had never considered the individual in responsible relationship to the State. The suggestion was new to him, and highly disturbing. He had up to the present considered himself in the light of a very good citizen, an example to other men who disregarded their duties to the borough in which they resided, and gave neither in money nor service to local affairs. He was respected in Moresby as a useful as well as a generous resident. It would have been difficult to fill his place if he left it; he could not conceive anyone filling it satisfactorily. And now he was told that all that counted for nothing, or at least for very little, since he was neglecting the principal duty of all. No wonder that Mr Musgrave was annoyed; that he looked upon Mrs Chadwick as highly objectionable, and resented her presence in his house.
“You are a very daring woman,” commented Mrs Sommers. “Although I have grown up with John I would never have ventured to say such a thing as that.”
“Possibly,” returned Mrs Chadwick calmly, “if I had been brought up with John I would not have adventured either. Familiarity with a person’s prejudices makes one diffident. I am not laying myself out to please Mr Musgrave, but to modernise him, as you suggested. When he is sufficiently modernised I mean to marry him.”
“You will need to obtain a divorce first,” retorted Mrs Sommers, laughing. “And I am sure John would not consider that respectable.”
“You have a mischievous habit of misrepresenting things. You know perfectly well that I am satisfied with my lot in life. I am going to find him a wife.”
“Oh?” said Mrs Sommers. She looked thoughtful. “I think you will have in that a more difficult task than in bringing him up to date.”
“We shall see,” returned Mrs Chadwick, and her tone was confident. “I think myself that lack of opportunity has bred the disinclination. No man is born a bachelor. The state, which is a misfit, results from his circumstances.”
“It isn’t due to lack of opportunity in John’s case,” Belle asserted. “The women who have run after him!..”
“Yes,” said Mrs Chadwick. She was thinking of Miss Simpson. “But that sort of woman doesn’t count, my dear.”
The successful married woman has, as a rule, a very good idea of the kind of women men like. The successful married woman is never the vain woman. The vain woman always imagines that the type she represents is the type men admire; usually she is at fault. Mrs Chadwick was not a vain woman. She knew very well that all men are not drawn towards the same type of woman. Some men prefer looks; others mental qualities; and, by an odd inconsistency in human nature, the perfectly simple-souled and self-disciplined man inclines naturally toward the woman endowed with the captivating wickedness of her sex. There is a big distinction between captivating wickedness and vice. No man, whether he be good or bad in principle, admires vice in the mothers of the race.
Since Mr Musgrave reckoned in the category of the simple, self-disciplined soul, plainly the woman for him must have a spice of wickedness in her. Mrs Chadwick may have been mistaken in her deduction, but at least she believed in it firmly.
Had John Musgrave had any idea of what floated through her busy brain while she smilingly confided to him some of her plans for the improvement of Moresby, he would have been horrified. Marriage was the one subject of all others he considered it indelicate to dwell upon. If people married they did it for some good reason; to contemplate the step impartially with, no adequate motive for so serious an undertaking was to him unthinkable. Had he ever reflected upon it, and attempted a portrait of the lady he might have honoured with his preference, it certainly would not have been a woman with any latent wickedness in her. John Musgrave’s ideal, had he been called upon to embody an ideal, would have revealed the picture of a calm-faced woman of unemotional temperament, who would always have said and done the correct thing, would have adorned his home, and revered himself, and would have been in every sense of the word womanly.
Mrs Chadwick could have told him that such a woman did not exist outside a man’s imagination. She would not have done so, of course. She believed in encouraging masculine fallacies when they were harmless; to attempt discouragement was to invite defeat. Opposition is the least effective form of argument. A clever woman seldom makes the mistake of forcing her ideas; and Mrs Chadwick was undoubtedly clever.
“Anything can be accomplished through suggestion,” she had been heard to assert. “Suggestion, plant it where you will, is a seed which never fails to germinate.”
Chapter Six
Miss Simpson contemplated her appearance by the aid of the long mirror in her wardrobe with an eye sharply critical as that of the vainest of her sisters, whose concern for outward things she held generally in contempt. But a visit to the house of a bachelor in regard to whom one entertains matrimonial intentions excuses, as anyone will acknowledge, a greater attentiveness to detail than usual.
The result of her inspection was on the whole satisfactory. The effect of