" He
looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and
young. "It'll take at least six generations before you're sufficiently
thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what
a bully the ordinary man is," he continued, "the ordinary hard-working,
rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up
and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters
have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to
bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over
again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background. . . . Do you
really think that the vote will do you any good?"
"The vote?" Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as a little bit of
paper which she dropped into a box before she understood his question,
and looking at each other they smiled at something absurd in the
question.
"Not to me," she said. "But I play the piano. . . . Are men really like
that?" she asked, returning to the question that interested her. "I'm
not afraid of you." She looked at him easily.
"Oh, I'm different," Hewet replied. "I've got between six and seven
hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes a novelist seriously,
thank heavens. There's no doubt it helps to make up for the drudgery of
a profession if a man's taken very, very seriously by every one--if
he gets appointments, and has offices and a title, and lots of letters
after his name, and bits of ribbon and degrees.
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