“Don’t you think that the little measures on the tops of the new canisters are extravagant for China tea?”
That, of course, admitted me to the peculiar intimacy that women allow to other women, or to poets, or to dangerous men. Edward, I know, dislikes the drinking of China tea because it is against the principle of supporting the British flag. But Miss Averies in her unequal battle with this youth of the classical features slightly vulgarized, called me in to show a sign of sympathy—to give at least the flicker of the other side—of the woman, the poet, or the pessimist among men. She asked me, in fact, not to take up the cudgels to the extent of saying that China tea is the thing to drink—that would have been treason to Edward—but she desired that her instinct should be acknowledged to the extent of saying that the measures of canisters should be contrived to suit the one kind of tea as well as the other. In his blind sort of way Edward caught the challenge in the remark and his straight brows lowered a very little.
“If you don’t have more than three pounds of China tea in the house in a year it won’t matter about the measures,” he said. “We never use more at Shackleton.”
“But it makes the tea too strong, Edward.”
“Then you need not fill the measure,” he answered.
“Oh, I wish,” she said to me, “that you’d tell Edward not to make me make tea at all. I dread it. The servants do it so much better.”
“So,” I asked, “Edward has arranged everything down to the last detail?”
Edward looked to me for approval and applause.
“You see, Annie has had so little experience, and I’ve had to look after my mother’s house for years.” His air said: “Yes! You’ll see our establishment will be run on the very best lines! Don’t you admire the way I’m taming her already?”
I gave him, of course, a significant glance. Heaven knows why: for it is absolutely true that I am tired of appearing reliable—to Edward Burden or anyone else in the world. What I want to do is simply to say to Edward Burden: “No, I don’t at all admire your dragging down a little bundle of ideals and sentiments to your own fatted calf’s level.”
I suppose I have in me something of the poet. I can imagine that if I had to love or to marry this little Averies girl I should try to find out what was her tiny vanity and I should minister to it. In some way I should discover from her that she considered herself charming, or discreet, or tasteful, or frivolous, beyond all her fellows. And, having discovered it, I should bend all my energies to giving her opportunities for displaying her charm, her discreetness or her coquetry. With a woman of larger and finer mould—with you!—I should no doubt bring into play my own idealism. I should invest her with the attributes that I consider the most desirable in the world. But in either case I cannot figure myself dragging her down to my own social or material necessities.
That is what Edward Burden is doing for little Miss Averies. I don’t mean to say that he does not idealize her—but he sees her transfigured as the dispenser of his special brand of tea or the mother of the sort of child that he was. And that seems to me a very valid reason why women, if they were wise, should trust their fortunes cold-bloodedly and of set reason to the class of dangerous men that now allure them and that they flee from.
They flee from them, I am convinced, because they fear for their worldly material fortunes. They fear, that is to say, that the poet is not a stable man of business: they recognise that he is a gambler—and it seems to them that it is folly to trust to a gambler for lifelong protection. In that they are perhaps right. But I think that no woman doubts her power to retain a man’s affection—so that it is not to the reputation for matrimonial instability that the poet owes his disfavour. A woman lives, in short, to play with this particular fire, since to herself she says: “Here is a man who has broken the hearts of many women. I will essay the adventure of taming him.” And, if she considers the adventure a dangerous one, that renders the contest only the more alluring, since at heart every woman, like every poet, is a gambler. In that perhaps she is right.
But it seems to me that women make a great mistake in the value of the stakes they are ready to pay in order to enter this game. They will stake, that is to say, their relatively great coin—their sentimental lives; but they hoard with closed fingers the threepenny bit which is merely the material future.
They prefer, that is to say, to be rendered the mere presiding geniuses of well-loaded boards. It is better to be a lady—which you will remember philologically means a “loaf-cutter”—than to be an Ideal.
And in this they are obviously wrong. If a woman can achieve the obvious miracle of making a dangerous man stable in his affections she may well be confident that she can persuade him to turn his serious attention to the task of keeping a roof over her head. Certainly, I know, if I were a woman which of the two types of men I would choose. Upon the lowest basis it is better for
