“I am afraid I’m not as familiar with his work as I ought to be, but I can’t say I’ve been very greatly impressed as far as I have gone.”
“Don’t go any further. There’s nothing there to go for.”
Who are you speaking of? How do you know? What have you got that makes you think he has nothing?—Miriam almost cried aloud. Could she not see, could not both of them see that the quiet sheen of the green-painted window-frame cast off their complacent speech? Did they not hear it tinkle emptily back from the twined leaves and tendrils, the flowers and butterflies painted on the window in front of them? The patient had turned briskly to the spittoon again after her little speech. She would have a remark ready when the brisk rinsing was over. There could be no peace in her presence. Even when she was gagged there would be the sense of her sending out little teasing thoughts and comments. They could never leave anything alone … oh it was that woman … the little gold knot at the back of the cheerful little gold head; hair that curled tightly about her head when she was a baby and that had grown long and been pinned up, as the clever daughter of that man; getting to know all he had said about women. If she believed it she must loathe her married state and her children … how could she let life continue through her? Perhaps it was the sense of her treachery that gave her that bright brisk amused manner. It was a way of carrying things off, that maddening way of speaking of everything as if life were a jest at everybody’s expense … all “clever” women seemed to have that, never speaking what they thought or felt, but always things that sounded like quotations from men; so that they always seemed to flatter or criticise the men they were with according as they were as clever as some man they knew, or less clever. What was she like when she was alone and dropped that bright manner. … “Have you made any New Year resolutions? I don’t make any. My friends think me godless, I think them lacking in common sense” … exactly like a man; taking up a fixed attitude … having a sort of prepared way of taking everything … like the Wilsons … anything else was “unintelligent” or “absurd” … their impatience meant something. Somehow all the other people were a reproach. If some day everyone lived in the clear light of science, “waiting for the pronouncements of science in all the affairs of life,” waiting for the pronouncements of those sensual dyspeptic men with families who thought of women as existing only to produce more men … admirably fitted by Nature’s inexorable laws for her biological role … perhaps she agreed or pretended to think it all a great lark … the last vilest flattery … she had only two children … si la femme avait plus de sensibilité elle ne retomberait pas si facilement dans la grossesse. … La femme, c’est peu galant de le dire, est la femelle de l’homme. The Frenchman at any rate wanted to say something else. But why want to be gallant … and why not say man; it is not very graceful to say it, is the male of woman. If women had been the recorders of things from the beginning it would all have been the other way round … Mary. Mary, the Jewess, write something about Mary the Jewess; the Frenchman’s Queen of Heaven.
Englishmen; the English were “the leading race.” “England and America together—the Anglo-Saxon peoples—could govern the destinies of the world.” What world? … millions and millions of childbirths … colonial women would keep it all going … and religious people … and if religion went on there would always be all the people who took the Bible literally … and if religion were not true then there was only science. Either way was equally abominable … for women.
The far end of the ward was bright sunlight … there she was enthroned, commanding the whole length of the ward, sitting upright, her head and shoulders already conversational, her hands busy with objects on the bed towards which her welcoming head was momentarily bent; like a hostess moving chairs in a small drawing room … chrysanthemums all down the ward—massed on little tables … a parrot sidling and bobbing along its perch, great big funny solemn French grey, fresh clean living French grey pure in the sunlight, a pure canary coloured beak … clean grey and yellow … in the sun … a curious silent noise in the stillness of the ward.
“I couldn’t hear; I wasn’t near enough.”
“Better late than never, I said.”
“D’you know I thought you’d only been here a few days and today when I looked at your letter I was simply astounded. You’re sitting up.”
“I should hope I am. They kept me on my back, half starving for three weeks.”
“You look very pink and well now.”
“That’s what Dr. Ashley Densley said. You ought to have seen me when I came in. You see I’m on chicken now.”
“And you feel better.”
“Well—you can’t really tell how you are till you’re up.”
“When are you going to get up?”
“Tomorrow, I hope, dear. So you see you’re just in
