going
off. I stared at her. How provoking she was! So I went on to finish my
tirade. "She struck me at first sight as the most inconsiderate wrong-
headed girl that I ever . . . "

"Why should a girl be more considerate than anyone else? More than any
man, for instance?" inquired Mrs. Fyne with a still greater assertion of
responsibility in her bearing.

Of course I exclaimed at this, not very loudly it is true, but forcibly.
Were then the feelings of friends, relations and even of strangers to be
disregarded? I asked Mrs. Fyne if she did not think it was a sort of
duty to show elementary consideration not only for the natural feelings
but even for the prejudices of one's fellow-creatures.

Her answer knocked me over.

"Not for a woman."

Just like that. I confess that I went down flat. And while in that
collapsed state I learned the true nature of Mrs. Fyne's feminist
doctrine. It was not political, it was not social. It was a knock-me-
down doctrine--a practical individualistic doctrine. You would not thank
me for expounding it to you at large. Indeed I think that she herself
did not enlighten me fully. There must have been things not fit for a
man to hear. But shortly, and as far as my bewilderment allowed me to
grasp its naive atrociousness, it was something like this: that no
consideration, no delicacy, no tenderness, no scruples should stand in
the way of a woman (who by the mere fact of her sex was the predestined
victim of conditions created by men's selfish passions, their vices and
their abominable tyranny) from taking the shortest cut towards securing
for herself the easiest possible existence. She had even the right to go
out of existence without considering anyone's feelings or convenience
since some women's existences were made impossible by the shortsighted
baseness of men.

I looked at her, sitting before the lamp at one o'clock in the morning,
with her mature, smooth-cheeked face of masculine shape robbed of its
freshness by fatigue; at her eyes dimmed by this senseless vigil. I
looked also at Fyne; the mud was drying on him; he was obviously tired.
The weariness of solemnity. But he preserved an unflinching, endorsing,
gravity of expression. Endorsing it all as became a good, convinced
husband.

"Oh! I see," I said. "No consideration . . . Well I hope you like it."

They amused me beyond the wildest imaginings of which I was capable.
After the first shock, you understand,