But the beginnings of abstract discussion had brought a most joyful relief, and a confirming intensification of the beauty of the interiors and of the surrounding landscape, in which their talks were set. Discussing people, save when he elaborated legend and profanity until privately she called upon the hosts of heaven to share this brightest terrestrial mirth, cast a spell of sadness all about her. With every finished vignette there came a sense of ending. Sacrificed to its sharp expressiveness were the real moments of these people’s lives; and the moments of the present, counting themselves off, ignored and irrecoverable, offering, as their extension, time that was unendurably narrow and confined, a narrow featureless darkness, its walls grinning with the transfixed features of consciousness that had always been, and must, if the pictures were accepted as true, forever be, a motionless absurdity.
Launched into wide opposition, no longer trying to see with his eyes, while still hoarding, as a contrasting amplification of her own visions, much that he had given her, she found people still there; rallying round her in might, ranging forward through time, each one standing clear of everything that offered material for ironic commentary, in a radiant individuality.
Wide generalisation was, she had immediately vowed, the way to illuminating contemplation of humanity. Its exercise made the present moment a life in itself, going on forever; the thought of the speakers and the surroundings blended in an unforgettable whole; her past life gleaming about her in a chain of moments; leaping glad acceptances or ardent refusals, of large general views.
The joy of making statements not drawn from things heard or read but plumbed directly from the unconscious accumulations of her own experience was fermented by the surprise of his interested attention, and the pride of getting him occasionally to accept an idea or to modify a point of view. It beamed compensation for what she was losing in sacrificing, whenever expression was urgent in her, his unmatchable monologue to her own shapeless outpourings. But she laboured, now and then successfully, to hold this emotion in subjection to the urgency of the things she longed to express.
“Women, everybody knows nowadays, have made civilisation, the thing civilisation is so proud of—social life. It’s one of the things I dislike in them. There you are, by the way, women were the first socialists.” Havelock Ellis; and Emerson quoting Firdusi’s description of his Persian Lilla … but the impression, remaining more sharp and deep than the event, became one’s own by revealing an inborn sharing of the view expressed. And waiting behind it now, was the proof, in life, as she had seen it.
“I don’t mean that idea of public opinion ‘the great moulding and civilising force steered by women’ that even the most pessimistic men admit, in horror.”
“What do you mean, Miriam?” Patient scepticism.
“Something quite different. It’s amazing, the blindness in men, even in you, about women. There must be a reason for it. Because it’s universal. It’s no good looking, with no matter what eyes, if you look in the wrong place. All that men have done, since the beginning of the world, is to find out and give names to and do, the things that were in women from the beginning, and that the best of them have been doing all the time. Not me.”
“You, Miriam, are an incorrigible loafer. I’ve a sneaking sympathy with that.”
“Well, the thing is, that whereas a few men here and there are creators, originators … artists, women are this all the time.”
“My dear Miriam, I don’t know what women are. I’m enormously interested in sex; but I don’t know anything about it. Nobody does. That’s just where we are.”
“Because you’re a man and have no personality.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Miriam.”
“How can a man have personality?”
“All right. Men—have no personality.”
“You see women simply as a sex. That’s one of the proofs.”
“Right. Women have no sex.”
“You are doubtful about ‘emancipating’ women, because you think it will upset their sex-life.”
“I don’t know anything, Miriam. No personality. No knowledge. But there’s Miss Waugh, with a thoroughly able career behind her; been everywhere, done everything, my dear Miriam; come out of it all, shouting you back into the nursery.”
“I don’t know her. Perhaps she’s jealous, like a man, of her freedom. But the point is, there’s no emancipation to be done. Women are emancipated.”
“Prove it, Miriam.”
“I can. Through their preeminence in an art. The art of making atmospheres. It’s as big an art as any other. Most women can exercise it, for reasons, by fits and starts. The best women work at it the whole of the time. Not one man in a million is aware of it. It’s like air within the air. It may be deadly. Cramping and awful, or simply destructive, so that no life is possible within it. So is the bad art of men. At its best it is absolutely life-giving. And not soft. Very hard and stern and austere in its beauty. And like mountain air. And you can’t get behind it, or in any way divide it up. Just as with ‘Art.’ Men live in it and from it all their lives without knowing. Even recluses.”
“Don’t drive it too far, Miriam.”
“Well; I’m so staggered by it. All women, of course, know about it, and there’s the explanation of why women clash. Over what men call ‘trifles.’ Because the thing I mean goes through everything. A woman’s way of ‘being’ can be discovered in the way she pours out tea. Men can’t get on together. If they’re boxed up. Do you know there’s hardly a partnership in Wimpole Street that’s not a permanent feud. Yes. Would you believe it. And for scandal and gossip and jealousy there’s nothing to beat the professors in a University Town. Several of them don’t speak. They communicate by
