But not in any cloistered world. Women who lived merely womanish lives,
without knowledge of and comradeship with men, seemed to her limited and
parochial creatures. She was impatient of her sex, and the narrowness
of her sex's sphere. She dreamed of a broadly human, practical,
disinterested relation between men and women, based on the actual work of
the world; its social, artistic, intellectual work; all that has made
civilization.
"We women are starved"--she thought, "because men will only marry
us--or make playthings of us. But the world is only just--these last
years--open to us, as it has been open to men for thousands of
generations. We want to taste and handle it for ourselves; as men do.
Why can't they take us by the hand--a few of us--teach us, confide in
us, open the treasure-house to us?--and let us alone! To be treated as
good fellows!--that's all we ask. Some of us would make such fratchy
wives--and such excellent friends! I vow I should make a good friend! Why
shouldn't Lord Tatham try?"
And letting her work fall upon the grass, she sat smiling and thinking,
her pale brown hair blown back by the wind. In her simple gray dress,
which showed the rippling beauty of every line, she was like one of these
innumerable angels or virtues, by artists illustrious or forgotten, which
throng the golden twilight of an Italian church; drawing back the
curtains of a Doge; hovering in quiet skies; or offering the Annunciation
lily, from one side of a great tomb, to the shrinking Madonna on the
other.
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