"Is that the sort of woman that you would have married," said Cornelia, "if you had married?"
"Let us not discuss the woman I would have married. Or rather let me remind you of this about her: the reason why the woman I would have married decided not to marry me was her clear-eyed perception, after some tears and emotional stress, that love was not enough to live on: that what I could offer her was not enough to make up a life for the many-sided being that she knew herself to be."
I paused a moment for a response. But Cornelia kept silence, looking out over the blue water. I continued:—
"If a girl is so placed in the world that she can find expression for the versatility of human nature in a really satisfactory domestic life and really satisfactory society and luxurious travel and beautiful surroundings and the fine things in literature and art and the rearing of really superior children—why, then she may not be tempted at all by advertising and real estate. But can't you see, Cornelia, that for the immense majority of girls the only way of getting anything but their conjugal and maternal capacities valued or expressed, and the only way of getting even their feminine charms to a suitable market lies through some such avenues as I have mentioned?"
"Yes," said Cornelia, "I know girls are going in for these things more and more; that is why I am so much worried about my son. I don't want him to become interested in that sort of girl. She wouldn't make him happy. She wouldn't be a good wife for him. Yet, just now, he seems to have a mania for 'girls that do things.' I know it's the fashion for girls to 'do things' nowadays; but don't you hate to see them doing them?"
"I truly do not. I admit that 'careers' for women are still in a more or less experimental stage. But the results from the ancient experiment in keeping women out of careers are all in. I am curious to see the results of the more recent experiment. Professional men, as life wears on, come to look upon a career, with all its burdens, as literally the one indispensable element, without which existence would be intolerable. For ages, men have lied to their sweethearts; have deceived them into thinking sweethearts and wives are the indispensable elements in the happiness of men. But it really is not so."
"Oh, isn't it?"
"No. And the girls themselves are finding it out, and are very sensibly claiming a share in the substantial satisfactions of life."
"You have no imagination. You don't understand. It's so simple, so perfectly simple. Substantial satisfactions for men are not substantial satisfactions for women. That is all there is to it. The things that please you and fill your lives are sawdust to us—after the first novelty wears off; and they leave our hearts aching and burning. I am certain there isn't a mature woman in business who wouldn't admit, if she were honest, that if the choice were open, she would choose even a moderately successful marriage in preference to a brilliant success in business. They are making a mistake—such a mistake. I am sure that, in their hearts, they know from the outset that it isn't what their hearts desire."
"About the hearts of young girls," I admitted, "I know next to nothing. I am still curious about them because I have heard so much about them. But the only occasion on which I ever asked a girl for her heart, she gave me a stone. And I believe that, far oftener than most men suspect, the place in the pectoral cavity of women assigned to the heart is occupied by some far harder substance. You remember that lovely creature in Balzac whose lover overheard her in solitude exclaiming, 'My God! O my God!'; and the words seemed to him to come from the uttermost depths of her heart and made him love her more passionately than ever, till he learned that she had merely been anxious about her stock speculations—and that the deep suspiration really came from the woman's purse."
Cornelia was not impressed by this reference to Balzac. She has a capable business head herself, and manages her property, which is considerable, with more judgment than her husband displays. She ignored the malice in my speech and merely remarked:—
"A nice woman need not be a fool in money matters."
"No," I continued, "and many of them aren't. That is why I believe many of them are not making a mistake but following a real vocation when they turn to business. I don't know much about their hearts, but I have had extensive opportunity to observe their brains, and, in some respects, I am tremendously impressed by them."
"Oh, we have some common-sense among us," she agreed.
"It isn't common-sense so much," I corrected, "in which girls excel. It is a special faculty of their sex, a kind of darting velocity of mind, which men of other races, the Jews and the Chinese, for example, display more abundantly than Anglo-Saxon men. In manual deftness, in celerity of apprehension, in executive readiness, in a kind of swift practical insight, in flying straight to the point, girls and young women are proving dangerous competitors. They remind me of turtle doves, which, you know, have two very different notes. They coo and coo in the woods, till you think that a mournful amorousness is all they are good for; but if you start them up, they go 'piet, piet, piet' at ninety miles an hour to their next destination."
"Oliver is quicker than I am," said Cornelia, whose generalizations on the virtues rest largely on observation of her own family, "but Dorothy is quicker than her brother; and I am quicker than you are. Yes, I think you are right. Girls are quicker. But quickness isn't very important in itself. The important thing is to know where one is going."
"Girls show," I proceeded, "very many of them, what the advocates of mental tests recognize as officer quality. I suspect that, if the draft were made universal, and if the army tests were applied to all the women in the country, not only would the disgrace of our moron percentage be greatly abated, but ninety-nine per cent of the men would be obliged to serve in the ranks. Among women, there is an immediacy of reaction to stimuli, a freedom from dubitation, subordinate considerations, and inhibiting afterthoughts, which make them invaluable members of a General Staff, when the General Staff is infested with doubting Thomases, Hamlets, and authorities on red tape."
"If you think that," inquired Cornelia, "why don't you, and why doesn't Oliver, give more attention to what I tell him is right?"
"Because," I replied, "we are harassed by subordinate considerations and afterthoughts. But that is just what makes women want to get their hands on things and manage them. I am astounded every day to discover in how many big businesses and even political organizations there is some woman, who has perhaps risen from a stenographic position, sitting in with the chiefs of the concern at the centre of the web and actually telling the 'big wigs' what to do—actually ruling the whirlwind and directing the storm."
After this speech, I glanced at Cornelia to see whether she would admit to herself her own master passion, her suppressed desire. I could see that she was doing something which she ordinarily would no more think of doing in my presence than of doing up her hair: she was reflecting.
"Possibly," she conceded.
"Not possibly," I pursued, "but certainly. All women crave mastery, beginning with the government of their own husbands; and their happiness, after the first feigning delight of amorous surrender, is to extend their jurisdiction, to enlarge the limits of their empire. It is the quality that makes queens. It is the quality that made Elizabeth and not Burleigh the ruler of England, and Catherine, not her minister,—whoever he was,—ruler of all the Russias. It is a quality which you yourself possess, my dear Cornelia, in abundance, only you haven't an adequate throne to display it on; and so, instead of sending Raleigh to South America for galleons of treasure or telling the president of your company which railroad to buy next, you have to take it out in sending Oliver back to the city in disgrace because he has had Dorothy's hair bobbed."
"How I hate him!" cried Cornelia, as if still nursing the bitterness of defeat.
"Really?" I asked, in a momentary flutter of hope.
"But if queens feel as miserable as I do," she added, "since I have had to discipline him, I don't wish to be a queen."
"You have no choice," I murmured.
"But here comes the mail," she exclaimed, rising suddenly and putting on her hat. "Come! Let's go and meet it."
My secret hope sank like a stone into cold depths of resignation.
"All right," I assented sadly; "but why such eagerness for the mail this morning?"
"Why, I am hoping," she lilted, "I am hoping, of course, for a letter from Oliver, you idiot!"