that great idea of the woman watching
on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for
everything. For in the average human house there is one hole by which
money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with
the one hole, woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginess
of a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the less true
that it brings her into conflict with the special kind of spiritual
breadth that belongs to the males of the tribe. It brings her into
conflict with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of chaotic
feasting and deafening debate, which we noted in the last section. The
very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the more
into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the other
for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moral
weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the
male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; he
always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always
thinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor
districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get their
husbands home, simple minded "social workers" always imagine that every
husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It
never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser
conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries
to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the
teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money
that is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of time
that is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth but
what cometh out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man. They
will raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks) the
ridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wanted
to make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick.
But the real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the
real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality
of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but
there is the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and
where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to
crush her, to produce a re