It is a common belief amongst men that women cannot live together without quarrelling, and that they are unable to get work done by other women with any of the good will which men display in the same occupations. If this is true, the reason should not be looked for in any intersexual complications, such as fear or an acrid rivalry, but only in the perpetually recurring physical disturbances to which, as a sex, they are subjected; and as the ability and willingness of a man to use his fists in response to an affront has imposed sobriety and good humour towards each other in almost all their relations, so women have placed barriers of politeness and ceremonial between their fellow-women and their own excoriated sensibilities.
Mrs. Cafferty, therefore, dissembled her disappointment, and with an increased cordiality addressed herself towards Mary. Sitting down on the bedside, she discoursed on almost every subject upon which a woman may discourse. It is considered that the conversation of women, while incessant in its use, is rigorously bounded between the parlour and the kitchen, or, to be more precise, between the attic and the scullery; but these extremes are more inclusive than is imagined, for the attic has an outlook on the stars while the scullery usually opens on the kitchen garden or the dust-heap--vistas equal to horizons. The mysteries of death and birth occupy women far more than is the case with men, to whom political and mercantile speculations are more congenial. With immediate buying and selling, and all the absolute forms of exchange and barter, women are deeply engaged, so that the realities of trade are often more intelligible to them than to many merchants. If men understood domestic economy half as well as women do, then their political economy and their entire consequent statecraft would not be the futile muddle which it is.
It was all very interesting to Mary, and, moreover, she had a great desire for companionship at the moment. If she had been left alone it might have become necessary to confront certain thoughts, memories, pictures, from which she had a dim idea it would be wise to keep her distance. Her work on the previous day, the girl she had met in the house, the policeman--from all or any of these recollections she swerved mentally. She steadily rejected all impressions that touched upon these. The policeman floated vaguely on her consciousness not as a desirable person, not even as a person, but as a distance, as an hour of her childhood, as a half-forgotten quaintness, a memory which it would be better should never be revived. Indeed, her faint thought shadowed him as a person who was dead, and would never again be visible to her anywhere. So, resolutely, she let him drop down into her mind to some uncomfortable oubliette from whence he threatened with feeble insistence to pop up at any moment like a strange question or a sudden shame. She hid him in a rosy flush which a breath could have made flame unbearably, and she hid from him behind the light garrulity of Mrs. Cafferty, through which now and again, as through a veil, she saw the spike of his helmet, a wiry, bristling moustache, a surge of great shoulders. On these ghostly indications she heaped a tornado of words which swamped the wraith, but she knew he was waiting to catch her alone, and would certainly catch her, and the knowledge made her hate him.
XXII
Mrs. Cafferty suggested that she and Mary should go out together to purchase that day's dinner, and by the time she had draped her shoulders in a shawl, buried her head in a bonnet, cautioned all her brood against going near the fireplace, the coal-box, and the slop-bucket, cut a slice of bread for each of them, and placed each of them in charge of all the rest, Mary's more elaborate dressing was within two stages of her hat.
"Wait until you have children, my dear," said Mrs. Cafferty, "you won't be so pernickety then." She further told Mary that when she was herself younger she had often spent an hour and a half doing up her hair, and she had been so particular that the putting on of a blouse or the pinning of a skirt to a belt had tormented her happily for two hours. "But, bless you," she roared, "you get out of all that when you get children. Wait till you have six of them to be dressed every morning, and they with some of their boots lost and the rest of them mixed up, and each of them wriggling like an eel on a pan until you have to slap the devil out of them before their stocking can be got on: the way they screw their toes up in the wrong places and the way they squeal that you're pinching them! and the way that they say you've rubbed soap in their eyes!"--Mrs. Cafferty lifted her eyes and her hands to the ceiling in a dumb remonstrance with Providence, and dropped them again forlornly as one in whom Providence had never been really interested "you'll have all the dressing you want, and a bit over for luck," said she.
She complimented Mary on her hair, her complexion, the smallness of her feet, the largeness of her eyes, the slenderness of her waist, the width of her hat and of her shoestrings: so impartially and inclusively did she compliment her that by the time they went
