Who are you speaking of? How do you know? What have _you_ got that makes you think he has nothing?--Miriam almost cried aloud. Could she not see, could not both of them see that the quiet sheen of the green-painted window-frame cast off their complacent speech? Did they not hear it tinkle emptily back from the twined leaves and tendrils, the flowers and butterflies painted on the window in front of them? The patient had turned briskly to the spittoon again after her little speech. She would have a remark ready when the brisk rinsing was over. There could be no peace in her presence. Even when she was gagged there would be the sense of her sending out little teasing thoughts and comments. They could never leave anything alone ... oh it was _that_ woman ... the little gold knot at the back of the cheerful little gold head; hair that curled tightly about her head when she was a baby and that had grown long and been pinned up, as the clever daughter of that man; getting to know all he had said about women. If she believed it she must loathe her married state and her children ... how _could_ she let life continue through her? Perhaps it was the sense of her treachery that _gave_ her that bright brisk amused manner. It was a way of carrying things off, that maddening way of speaking of everything as if life were a jest at everybody's expense ... all "clever" women seemed to have that, _never_ speaking what they thought or felt, but always things that sounded like quotations from men; so that they always seemed to flatter or criticise the men they were with according as they were as clever as some man they knew, or less clever. _What_ was she like when she was alone and dropped that bright _manner_.... "Have you made any New Year resolutions? I don't make any. My friends think me godless, _I_ think _them_ lacking in common sense" ... exactly like a man; taking up a fixed attitude ... having a sort of prepared way of taking everything ... like the Wilsons ... anything else was 'unintelligent' or 'absurd' ... their impatience meant something. Somehow all the other people were a reproach. If some day everyone lived in the clear light of science, "waiting for the pronouncements of science in all the affairs of life," waiting for the pronouncements of those sensual dyspeptic men with families who thought of women as existing only to produce more men ... admirably fitted by Nature's inexorable laws for her biological rôle ... perhaps she agreed or pretended to think it all a great lark ... the last vilest flattery ... she had only two children ... si la femme avait plus de sensibilité elle ne retomberait pas si facilement dans la grossesse.... La femme, c'est peu galant de le dire, est la femelle de l'homme. The Frenchman at any rate _wanted_ to say something else. But why want to be gallant ... and why not say man; it is not very graceful to say it, is the male of woman. If women had been the recorders of things from the beginning it