Chapter X

“That speech,” laugh’d she thus bandied, “scarce deserves
Our ‘Well done as a woman!’—Edith, hark,
His praise for you is, ‘Well done as a man!’”

Then Edith, echoing after, naïvely dropt,
“I tell you—nay—I will not say it though.”

“Please do?” I ventur’d.
“Nay; it may offend,”
Replied she; while her shoulders gently shrugg’d
As if to tempt me like two dainty doors,
Doors all but swung ajar before a heart
That love was dared to enter!
“Nay,” I said,
“I vow you such a deal of patience now!”

“I do not know,” she answer’d; “am not sure.
Your manly patience might break loose to sigh
More hints about my manhood! Just to think
That half of all mankind are merely girls
And so must borrow all their tact from men!”

“Not so,” I said; “not so; but commonly.”—

“Ah, commonly! and what,” she sigh’d, “is this
That men-minds do so well?—discriminate?
Yet even I, dull woman, I can see
Brains differ in their grain. But men, forsooth,
Feel so much matter lodged in their brains—eh?—
That they weigh mind like matter in the lump,
And judge of character, as if ’twere clay:—
This forms a man—has wisdom, firmness, power;
And that, a maid—is foolish, fickle, frail,
And never can be wholly safe, forsooth,
Except when subject to a man, her lord!”

“Ah, but,” I said, “we men all prize you so!
To hold you ours, our pride seems infinite.
Thus lifted up by you, it is your fault
If we seem lords to you.”
“Is it?” she ask’d,
“Or have you seem’d so long our lords, you think
Your lording over us has trained in us
What still needs lording over? Fashion yields
A man, at times, exemption from her forms,
But woman never. Wherefore, pray, is this?
Do not they both have souls? and both aspire?
Must one class only slave it to her sex?—
I think the soul of woman as of man
May show some mastery over its abode.”

“But yet,” I said, “You know, her frame divine—
And soul, too—men confuse things—who can tell
Which is the soul?”

She answer’d absently:
“In truth they do confuse things! only wise,
As owls that blink at light!—so blind—nor see
What day dawns with a wife’s enfranchisement;
Ambitious, but forgetting that the meek,
Inherit heaven, or that the oppressor dwarfs
His own surroundings; that if pride stoop not,
Then must the soul; that earthly lords must bend,
And lift their consorts to their own prized seats,
As equals, queens; or else must house with slaves,
And make the slavish habits there their own.”