“And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t understood much either.” Irais was plainly irritated.
“Your opinion of woman,” said Minora in a very small voice, “is not a high one. But, in the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no one could take her place?”
“If you are thinking of hospital-nurses,” I said, “I must tell you that I believe he married chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a strange woman to nurse him when he is sick.”
“But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way her illusions were being knocked about, “the sickroom is surely the very place of all others in which a woman’s gentleness and tact are most valuable.”
“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of Wrath. “I have never met those qualities in the professional nurse. According to my experience, she is a disagreeable person who finds in private nursing exquisite opportunities for asserting her superiority over ordinary and prostrate mankind. I know of no more humiliating position for a man than to be in bed having his feverish brow soothed by a sprucely-dressed strange woman, bristling with starch and spotlessness. He would give half his income for his clothes, and probably the other half if she would leave him alone, and go away altogether. He feels her superiority through every pore; he never before realised how absolutely inferior he is; he is abjectly polite, and contemptibly conciliatory; if a friend comes to see him, he eagerly praises her in case she should be listening behind the screen; he cannot call his soul his own, and, what is far more intolerable, neither is he sure that his body really belongs to him; he has read of ministering angels and the light touch of a woman’s hand, but the day on which he can ring for his servant and put on his socks in private fills him with the same sort of wildness of joy that he felt as a homesick schoolboy at the end of his first term.”
Minora was silent. Irais’s foot was livelier than ever. The Man of Wrath stood smiling blandly down upon us. You can’t argue with a person so utterly convinced of his infallibility that he won’t even get angry with you; so we sat round and said nothing.
“If,” he went on, addressing Irais, who looked rebellious, “you doubt the truth of my remarks, and still cling to the old poetic notion of noble, self-sacrificing women tenderly helping the patient over the rough places on the road to death or recovery, let me beg you to try for yourself, next time anyone in your house is ill, whether the actual fact in any way corresponds to the picturesque belief. The angel who is to alleviate our sufferings comes in such a questionable shape, that to the unimaginative she appears merely as an extremely self-confident young woman, wisely concerned first of all in securing her personal comfort, much given to complaints about her food and to helplessness where she should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary capacity for fancying herself slighted, or not regarded as the superior being she knows herself to be, morbidly anxious lest the servants should, by some mistake, treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish if the patient gives more trouble than she had expected, intensely injured and disagreeable if he is made so courageous by his wretchedness as to wake her during the night—an act of desperation of which I was guilty once, and once only. Oh, these good women! What sane man wants to have to do with angels? And especially do we object to having them about us when we are sick and sorry, when we feel in every fibre what poor things we are, and when all our fortitude is needed to enable us to bear our temporary inferiority patiently, without being forced besides to assume an attitude of eager and grovelling politeness towards the angel in the house.”
There was a pause.
“I didn’t know you could talk so much, Sage,” said Irais at length.
“What would you have women do, then?” asked Minora meekly. Irais began to beat her foot up and down again—what did it matter what Men of Wrath would have us do? “There are not,” continued Minora, blushing, “husbands enough for everyone, and the rest must do something.”
“Certainly,” replied the oracle. “Study the art of pleasing by dress and manner as long as you are of an age to interest us, and above all, let all women, pretty and plain, married and single, study the art of cookery. If you are an artist in the kitchen you will always be esteemed.”
I sat very still. Every German woman, even the wayward Irais, has learned to cook; I seem to have been the only one who was naughty and wouldn’t.
“Only be careful,” he went on, “in studying both arts, never to forget the great truth that dinner precedes blandishments and not blandishments dinner. A man must be made comfortable before he will make love to you; and though it is true that if you offered him a choice between Spickgans and kisses, he would say he would take both, yet he would invariably begin with the Spickgans, and allow the kisses to wait.”
At this I got up, and Irais followed my example. “Your cynicism is disgusting,” I said icily.
“You two are always exceptions to anything I may say,” he said, smiling amiably.
He stooped and kissed Irais’s hand. She is inordinately vain of her hands, and says her husband married her for their sake, which I can quite believe. I am glad they are on her and not on Minora, for if Minora had had them I should have been annoyed. Minora’s are bony, with chilly-looking knuckles, ignored nails, and too much wrist. I feel very well disposed towards her when my eye falls on them. She put one forward now, evidently thinking it would be kissed too.
“Did you know,” said Irais, seeing the movement, “that it is the
