Page:Ann Veronica, a modern love story.djvu/240

 of the world of business and competition, in which women and the future shelter."

"A little pit!" said Ann Veronica; "a little prison!"

"It's just as often a little refuge. Anyhow, that is how things are."

"And the man stands as the master at the mouth of the den."

"As sentinel. You forget all the mass of training and tradition and instinct that go to make him a tolerable master. Nature is a mother; her sympathies have always been feminist, and she has tempered the man to the shorn woman."

"I wish," said Ann Veronica, with sudden anger, "that you could know what it is to live in a pit!"

She stood up as she spoke, and put down her cup beside Miss Garvice's. She addressed Capes as though she spoke to him alone.

"I can't endure it," she said.

Every one turned to her in astonishment.

She felt she had to go on. "No man can realize," she said, "what that pit can be. The way—the way we are led on! We are taught to believe we are free in the world, to think we are queens.... Then we find out. We find out no man will treat a woman fairly as man to man—no man. He wants you—or he doesn't; and then he helps some other woman against you.... What you say is probably all true and necessary.... But think of the disillusionment! Except for our sex we have minds like men, desires like men. We come out into the world, some of us—"

She paused. Her words, as she said them, seemed to her to mean nothing, and there was so much that