A bowl of roses, just brought by Ann Veronica, adorned the communal dressing-table, and Ann Veronica was particularly trim in preparation for a call she was to make with her aunt later in the afternoon.
Ann Veronica decided to be more explicit. “I’ve been,” she said, “forbidden to come.”
“Hul-LO!” said Hetty, turning her head on the pillow; and Teddy remarked with profound emotion, “My God!”
“Yes,” said Ann Veronica, “and that complicates the situation.”
“Auntie?” asked Constance, who was conversant with Ann Veronica’s affairs.
“No! My father. It’s—it’s a serious prohibition.”
“Why?” asked Hetty.
“That’s the point. I asked him why, and he hadn’t a reason.”
“YOU ASKED YOUR FATHER FOR A REASON!” said Miss Miniver, with great intensity.
“Yes. I tried to have it out with him, but he wouldn’t have it out.” Ann Veronica reflected for an instant “That’s why I think I ought to come.”
“You asked your father for a reason!” Miss Miniver repeated.
“We always have things out with OUR father, poor dear!” said Hetty. “He’s got almost to like it.”
“Men,” said Miss Miniver, “NEVER have a reason. Never! And they don’t know it! They have no idea of it. It’s one of their worst traits, one of their very worst.”
“But I say, Vee,” said Constance, “if you come and you are forbidden to come there’ll be the deuce of a row.”
Ann Veronica was deciding for further confidences. Her situation was perplexing her very much, and the Widgett atmosphere was lax and sympathetic, and provocative of discussion. “It isn’t only the dance,” she said.
“There’s the classes,” said Constance, the well-informed.
“There’s the whole situation. Apparently I’m not to exist yet. I’m not to study, I’m not to grow. I’ve got to stay at home and remain in a state of suspended animation.”
“DUSTING!” said Miss Miniver, in a sepulchral voice.
“Until you marry, Vee,” said Hetty.
“Well, I don’t feel like standing it.”
“Thousands of women have married merely for freedom,” said Miss Miniver. “Thousands! Ugh! And found it a worse slavery.”
“I suppose,” said Constance, stencilling away at bright pink petals, “it’s our lot. But it’s very beastly.”
“What’s our lot?” asked her sister.
“Slavery! Downtroddenness! When I think of it I feel all over boot marks—men’s boots. We hide it bravely, but so it is. Damn! I’ve splashed.”
Miss Miniver’s manner became impressive. She addressed Ann Veronica with an air of conveying great open secrets to her. “As things are at present,” she said, “it is true. We live under man-made institutions, and that is what they amount to. Every girl in the world practically, except a few of us who teach or type-write, and then we’re underpaid and sweated—it’s dreadful to think how we are sweated!” She had lost her generalization, whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went on, conclusively, “Until we have the vote that is how things WILL be.”
“I’m all for the vote,” said Teddy.
“I suppose a girl MUST be underpaid and sweated,” said Ann Veronica. “I suppose there’s no way of getting a decent income—independently.”
“Women have practically NO economic freedom,” said Miss Miniver, “because they have no political freedom. Men have seen to that. The one profession, the one decent profession, I mean, for a woman—except the stage—is teaching, and there we trample on one another. Everywhere else—the law, medicine, the Stock Exchange—prejudice bars us.”
“There’s art,” said Ann Veronica, “and writing.”
“Every one hasn’t the Gift. Even there a woman never gets a fair chance. Men are against her. Whatever she does is minimized. All the best novels have been written by women, and yet see how men sneer at the lady novelist still! There’s only one way to get on for a woman, and that is to please men. That is what they think we are for!”
“We’re beasts,” said Teddy. “Beasts!”
But Miss Miniver took no notice of his admission.
“Of course,” said Miss Miniver—she went on in a regularly undulating voice—“we DO please men. We have that gift. We can see round them and behind them and through them, and most of us use that knowledge, in the silent way we have, for our great ends. Not all of us, but some of us. Too many. I wonder what men would say if we threw the mask aside—if we really told them what WE thought of them, really showed them what WE were.” A flush of excitement crept into her cheeks.
“Maternity,” she said, “has been our undoing.”
From that she opened out into a long, confused emphatic discourse on the position of women, full of wonderful statements, while Constance worked at her stencilling and Ann Veronica and Hetty listened, and Teddy contributed sympathetic noises and consumed cheap cigarettes. As she talked she made weak little gestures with her hands, and she thrust her face forward from her bent shoulders; and she peered sometimes at Ann Veronica and sometimes at a photograph of the Axenstrasse, near Fluelen, that hung upon the wall. Ann Veronica watched her face, vaguely sympathizing with her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and her convulsive movements, and the fine eyebrows were knit with a faint perplexity. Essentially the talk was a mixture of fragments of sentences heard, of passages read, or arguments indicated rather than stated, and all of it was served in a sauce of strange enthusiasm, thin yet intense. Ann Veronica had had some training at the Tredgold College in disentangling threads from confused statements, and she had a curious persuasion that in all this fluent muddle there was something—something real, something that signified. But it was very hard to follow. She did not understand the note of hostility to men that ran through it all, the bitter vindictiveness that lit Miss Miniver’s cheeks and eyes, the sense of some at last insupportable wrong slowly accumulated. She had no inkling of that insupportable wrong.
“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