The Wife of Sir Isaac HarmanWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
England -- Fiction; Upper class -- Fiction; Women's rights -- Fiction
Some day, when the arts of the writer and illustrator are more closely
blended than they are to-day, it will be possible to tell of all that
followed this blow, with an approach to its actual effect. Here there
should stand a page showing simply and plainly the lower half of the
window of the Jago Street Post Office, a dark, rather grimy pane,
reflecting the light of a street lamp—and _broken_. Below the pane
would come a band of evilly painted woodwork, a corner of letter-box, a
foot or so of brickwork, and then the pavement with a dropped lump of
iron. That would be the sole content of this page, and the next page
would be the same, but very slightly fainter, and across it would be
printed a dim sentence or so of explanation. The page following that
would show the same picture again, but now several lines of type would
be visible, and then, as one turned over, the smashed window would fade
a little, and the printed narrative, still darkened and dominated by
it, would nevertheless resume. One would read on how Lady Harman
returned to convince the incredulous young Yorkshireman of her feat,
how a man with a barrow-load of bananas volunteered comments, and how
she went in custody, but with the extremest dignity, to the
police-station. Then, with some difficulty, because that imposed
picture would still prevail over the letterpress, and because it would
be in small type, one would learn how she was bailed out by Lady
Beach-Mandarin, who was clearly the woman she ought to have gone to in
the first place, and who gave up a dinner with a duchess to entertain
her, and how Sir Isaac, being too torn by his feelings to come near her
spent the evening in a frantic attempt to keep the whole business out
of the papers. He could not manage it. The magistrate was friendly next
morning, but inelegant in his friendly expedients; he remanded Lady
Harman until her mental condition could be inquired into, but among her
fellow-defendants—there had been quite an epidemic of window-smashing
that evening—Lady Harman shone pre-eminently sane. She said she had
broken this window because she was assured that nothing would convince
people of the great dissatisfaction of women with their conditions
except such desperate acts, and when she was reminded of her four
daughters she said it was precisely the thought of how they too would
grow up to womanhood that had made her strike her blow. The statements
were rather the outcome of her evening with Lady Beach-Mandarin than
her own unaided discoveries, but she had honestly assimilated them, and
she expressed them with a certain simple dignity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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