He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:
“I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man alive.”
“I suppose we ARE more free than we were?” said Ann Veronica, keeping the question general.
“Oh, there’s no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties broke bounds and sailed away on bicycles--my young days go back to the very beginnings of that--it’s been one triumphant relaxation.”
“Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?”
“I mean we’ve long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the same. A woman isn’t much freer--in reality.”
“But it’s on condition one doesn’t do anything.”
He looked interrogation with a faint smile.
“It seems to me it comes to earning one’s living in the long run,” said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. “Until a girl can go away as a son does and earn her independent income, she’s still on a string. It may be a long string, long enough if you like to tangle up all sorts of people; but there it is! If the paymaster pulls, home she must go. That’s what I mean.”
Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed by Ann Veronica’s metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty Widgett. “YOU wouldn’t like to be independent?” he asked, abruptly. “I mean REALLY independent. On your own. It isn’t such fun as it seems.”
“Every one wants to be independent,” said Ann Veronica. “Every one. Man or woman.”
“There’s no why. It’s just to feel--one owns one’s self.”
“Nobody does that,” said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.
“But a boy--a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on his own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company, makes his own way of living.”
“I wonder! It’s out of the question, any way.”
“And besides,” said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside, “what could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession. But--it’s one of the things I’ve just been thinking over. Suppose--suppose a girl did want to start in life, start in life for herself--” She looked him frankly in the eyes. “What ought she to do?”
He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more personal and intimate. “I wonder what you could do?” he said. “I should think YOU could do all sorts of things....