Page:The Great Secret.djvu/177

Rh —pigs do not pay much attention to decoration—neither did he study their feelings in the slightest degree. He would have fought for them to the death, of course, and gored the enemy properly, but in the lair he ruffled them with royal disregard.

Singular to say these women who had passed through saloons and mocked courtly gentlemen, who had suffered tribulations and persecutions with a fierce and bitter hatred, who had both lectured about the rights of woman, sworn to destroy tyrants, defied all superstition and fetish-worship, now bent the knee in meek and lowly servitude to as vile a tyrant, as coarse a monster, as ever frightened and cowed the spirit of woman.

They hated each other with malignant yet unrevealed hatred, all on account of this ferocious beast who treated them both with equal favour. They fawned upon this red-haired monster as if he had been a god; they abased themselves to please him, and spoke to each other as if they had been loving sisters when he was near, while Dr Fernandez, the Anarchist, laughed to himself as he watched the antics of these disciples of Liberty, Atheism and Reason, who were behaving exactly as primitive savages would have done who have never enjoyed the benefits of civilisation. Truly it does not take humanity long to hark back to the flint stage if it gets a fair chance like this.

It is so easy for the best bred, most expensively-educated woman who has the taste to mate with an ignorant boor to become as great and almost as ignorant a troll as if he had picked her up originally from the dyke-side. The quarter of a short lifetime is often enough to make her forget even the rudiments of her cultivation, more than enough to make her forget her manners.