nd until a few years ago no woman had ever come
out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the
background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent
unrepresented life. Of course we're always writing about women--abusing
them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it's never come from
women themselves. I believe we still don't know in the least how they
live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely. If one's a man, the
only confidences one gets are from young women about their love affairs.
But the lives of women of forty, of unmarried women, of working women,
of women who keep shops and bring up children, of women like your aunts
or Mrs. Thornbury or Miss Allan--one knows nothing whatever about them.
They won't tell you. Either they're afraid, or they've got a way of
treating men. It's the man's view that's represented, you see. Think of
a railway train: fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn't it
make your blood boil? If I were a woman I'd blow some one's brains
out. Don't you laugh at us a great deal? Don't you think it all a great
humbug? You, I mean--how does it all strike you?"

His determination to know, while it gave meaning to their talk, hampered
her; he seemed to press further and further, and made it appear so
important. She took some time to answer, and during that time she went
over and over the course of her twenty-four years, lighting now on one
point, now on another--on her aunts, her mother, her father, and at last
her mind fixed upon her aunts and her father, and she tried to describe
them as at this distance they appeared to her.

They were very much afraid of her father. He was a great dim force in
the house, by means of which they held on to the great world which is
represented every morning in the _Times_. But the real life of the house
was something quite different from this. It went on independently of
Mr. Vinrace, and tended to hide itself from him. He was good-humoured
towards them, but contemptuous. She had always taken it for granted that
his point of view was just, and founded upon an ideal scale of things
where the life of one person was absolutely more important than the life
of another, and that in that scale they were much less importance than
he was. But did she really believe that? Hewet's words made her think.
She always submitted to her father, just as they did, but it was her
aunts who influenced her really; her aunts who bui