“Oh, I don’t know about that!” objected Maud. “My mother--do you know my mother?--has a passion, literally a passion, for making arrangements. Really her chief joy in life is arranging things quite irrespective of what the arrangements are; but I think people like her are mostly women.”
“Making people like me, especially if they hate me naturally. I wouldn’t say that it is my vocation, because lots of people detest me. Don’t trouble to say you don’t believe me. I am sure that sort of speech would come very badly from you.”
“Do you mean that I’ve got such awkward manners, or that I am naturally honest?”
“I mean that when a man doesn’t owe a compliment, it is no use his trying to pay one.”
“Compliments are a cheap way of paying debts. They are like apologies. I always apologize if it will do any good.”
“If I wasn’t a woman,” she said at length very slowly, “I should choose to be a man. No, it’s not such nonsense as it sounds. What I really mean is that men have great advantages over us in some ways. A woman can hardly ever become anything else than an amateur, and I want to be a professional artist, and a musician, and she-clergyman, living in the country. But I wouldn’t give up being a woman. Women have much more self than men, else they would have all taken to professions long ago. If men hadn’t professions they would all bore themselves to death. That is why they take to the Stock Exchange and politics--they do anything to make them forget their own selves. I don’t say that women are any better, but they find themselves more interesting than men do.”
“But men have to make money or else they couldn’t marry and support families,” said Tom rather feebly.
“Yes; but don’t you see that if women had not been sufficiently interested in themselves to make them not want professions, they would have had them long ago? They would both have worked for their living. As it is, a woman’s chief object is to marry a rich man, so that she can’t possibly work.”
“That’s a new idea,” said Tom. “What are you going to do with it?”
“You ought to marry a poor man, and help him to earn his living.”
“Unfortunately I have lots of money myself.”
“That is a misfortune. I am in the same state. One can’t give it all to a lunatic asylum, or else people think you are laying up treasure for your own dotage. I wish I was poor, really poor, you know, out at elbows, having to work for my bread. It must be exquisite to be poor.”