CHAPTER XXXVI

“There is still sun on the wall.”

“SO Launcelot is to go to school, and Cynthia is to be married, and you are to be left all alone?” asked Muriel smiling as she handed Geoff a cup of tea. She had handed him a good many cups of tea since he had been back in England.

“I am to be left all alone,” repeated the doctor, looking at her steadily.

“I have been practically alone ever since I can remember,” said Muriel suddenly, “but I have seldom been lonely. In fact I often think it is only the people who don’t live alone who _are_ lonely. They are always trying to be understood, to break through barriers and live on a common level, and there’s no such chance, for the more one shares the little things the more pitilessly isolated the big things make us. It is so dreadfully inadequate that tantalizing partial help one gets from others.”

“There I think you are wrong,” he said looking quietly across at her. “It’s the whole loaf theory you’re defending. You might just as well say a man had better have no legs than one, or could be as active without a crutch as with one, simply because he can’t be very active anyway. We all want what help we can get, and it is not the least necessary for people to understand us to help us. Children are the greatest help. People who know that we want the moon may be wise enough to tell us it is only a worn-out world of rocks, but people who can’t fathom our desires can still help us by telling us it is beautiful. It is one of the first lessons doctors learn to help patients to help themselves. In fact it is the greatest good we or anybody else can do.”

“Yet you don’t say that the most ignorant doctors are the best?” she prevaricated.

“No! because sympathy of that kind without knowledge is sympathy without a backbone. Physical cases require the definite as a foundation, but when one deals with the invisible, love comes first, not knowledge. Ignorant mothers mean more to their children than thoughtful scholars could—even if they do slap them occasionally. A man or woman without a home, if they have no jars and frets, must miss the influence of it, and feel the horrible loneliness of life.” He so intensely meant what he said that Muriel felt she had been flippant, and yet his seriousness made her long to be more so.

“Birds who sit on telegraph wires, and can fly away from the line of communication whenever they want to, are more to my liking,” she said.

“You forget that the birds have nests,” suggested the doctor smiling.

“And you that we don’t have wings,” sighed Muriel. “And we can’t change our mates every spring; when we choose we choose for life, expecting the better—and getting the worst!”

“Not always,” said Geoff quietly.

Muriel felt angry; she could not tell why. She had never talked in this strain before; she felt vicious with the universe, and its representative opposite her made her worse; besides she had just been to see Gladys.

“If there was an alternative we would take it,” she said. “But half of us women are brought up in such a lackadaisical way that there’s no use for us. When we have brains and opportunity we are generally physically handicapped. People don’t cut the woman who works now—they shrug their shoulders at her, and that’s worse! As for resources (they advise resources, you know, after one’s reached twenty-six), they are an outlet for wasted powers, a puny outlet, a mere compromise with failure! Oh! I’ve seen it again and again, dozens of times, capable, efficient girls brought up to be perfectly, daintily useless! After the schoolroom is over they get a dress allowance—and practise on the piano. Their heads must be full of something, so then come the rubbish—heaps of life, silly curates, silly extravagances, or piteously futile old maidhood! They keep us from being trained for anything else because they want us to marry, but all the other trainings help towards that the more one learns the more fit one is to teach. Self-reliance, good judgment and a sense of proportion are not out of place in a wife, and motherhood is only a word without them.” The doctor laughed.

“Train your enterprising exceptions,” he said; “perhaps in time they’ll give the average woman a lift, but I don’t go all the way with you by any means. You over-estimate women because of one or two women you have met who stand mentally above their race. Average women at present haven’t brains enough to seize opportunities or to apply sensible educations. Domesticities or resources, and a silly curate or two, are just what they can appreciate, and good, solid hard work what they wish to avoid. I don’t say women lack brains, but as a rule they lack depth and continuity. They have very little of the mental soundness, even the clever ones, that the average man has as a matter of course. They don’t concentrate, and they’re altogether too personal to make much headway in the professions. You needn’t look as if you wished to annihilate me, Miss Muriel—I’ve no doubt you could—but I believe it to be a fact that women as a whole haven’t got physical or intellectual stamina enough for public life, and all the education and opportunities in the world will never give it to them!”

“But we’re only beginning,” cried Muriel. “See how far we’ve got already.”

“That’s the worst argument you have got against you,” said the doctor smiling. “You are _too_ quick to be natural; you work in spurts with reactions—growth, _real_ growth, is a much slower affair. But even granting you that you have been kept back, you simply can’t be _more_ mentally than you have physical strength for, and as long as you are labelled women, you’ll be labelled _weak_.” Muriel laughed.

“You sound so horribly sensible,” she said, “and you leave us no power!”

“Ah! there you’re mistaken,” said the doctor. “All your strength (and Heaven knows you’ve got enough!) lies in weakness! When we come to the bottom of it, emotion rules the world, and woman is queen of the emotions.”

“Oh, doctor! doctor!” cried Muriel with uplifted hands. “Principles! principles!” Geoff smiled grimly.

“Ah! principles,” he said; “they are very good things for theories, and they act as a drug on the passions—but sometimes they don’t act! Good-bye, Miss Muriel, my principles warn me of my office hour.”

Muriel let him go willingly. She felt absurd, snubbed, dissatisfied. She wanted some one to look at her as Jack had looked, with those adoring, humble eyes, and to listen to her as Jack had listened passionately sympathetic, and ready to agree with her that two blacks make the loveliest white in the world. She hated herself for being so rubbed up the wrong way; and in one breath accused Dr. Grant of being rude, and herself of being ridiculous. Finally she decided that neither of these things had anything to do with it, but that she was upset about Gladys.