seemed to Maud to have coarsened somehow during this last year or two. She had become hard, she had lost compassion, she had grown tolerant of—even curious about—things that were not worth study, or, if studied, only merited intolerance—were only worth knowing in order to condemn them without qualification. It was not so long ago that they had had what to Maud was a rather agitating talk on the subject. Lucia had railed, with some bitterness, about the double law, the law that allowed a man so much licence and a woman so little. She had been advocate on behalf of greater indulgence for the woman. She spoke theoretically, of course, but her scheme of justice was that of completer liberty. In the eye of the law, no less than in the conventional judgment of society, a man might do really what he pleased, so long as he was not cruel to his wife, and paid her certain attentions; while a woman was a chattel, a dog led by a string, a bond-slave. It was from the social verdict particularly that Lucia rebelled; the legal one did not matter so much, for, so she said, if you are fool enough to be detected, you must suffer for your folly. But a man, socially speaking, could play about as he chose, and be socially untarnished, whereas a woman could never play at all.
About this Maud's verdict was that Lucia talked nonsense; the trouble was that she talked so much nonsense, and always said that it was when she was essentially herself that the charge of nonsense was brought against her, in mitigation, no doubt, of what should have been her sentence, but mistakenly. She had said it so often that Maud wondered whether there was some truth in it. But she could not bear to think that Lucia meant all she said. It had always been her way to say more than she meant; she felt intensely; she felt subtly, too, and announced with banner and trumpets the opening of some tiny little cul-de-sac that led nowhere, and was not meant for human passage, as if it had been some regal thoroughfare—a royal road for all mankind to traverse.
Maud went back over what she had said to-night. Her baby that was coming—what ludicrous things she had said about that! By her own account she was almost sorry that this was to be; she could in any case weigh the disadvantage of having a baby in June with the greater convenience of lying by in February or March. It was like—it was like grumbling that you had received a bad halfpenny in your change for a sixpence, when a cheque of a million pounds, certainly negotiable, had been just given you.
