§ 12

This conversation was a cardinal event in Joan’s life. Wilmington’s suggestions raised out of the grave of forgetfulness and incorporated with themselves a conversation she had had long ago with Adela—one Christmas at Pelham Ford when Adela had been in love with Sopwith Greene. Adela too had maintained that it was the business of a woman to choose her man and not wait to be chosen, and that it was the woman who had to make love. “A man’s in love with women in general,” had been Adela’s idea, “but women fall in love with men in particular.” Adela had used a queer phrase, “It’s for a woman to find her own man and keep him and take care of him.” Men had to do their own work; they couldn’t think about love as women were obliged by nature to think about love. “Love’s just a trouble to a real man, like a mosquito singing in his ear, until some woman takes care of him.”

All those ideas came back now to Joan’s mind, and she did her best to consider them and judge them as generalizations. But indeed she judged with a packed court, and all her being clamoured warmly for her to “get” Peter, to “take care”—most admirable phrase—of Peter. Her decision was made, and still she argued with herself. Was it beneath her dignity to set out and capture her Peter?—he 494was her Peter. Only he didn’t know it. She tried to generalize. Had it ever been dignified for a woman to wait until a man discovered her possible love? Was that at best anything more than the dignity of the mannequin?

Three-quarters at least of the art and literature of the world is concerned with the relations of the sexes, and yet here was Joan, after thirty centuries or so of human art and literature, still debating the elementary facts of her being. There is so much excitement in our art and literature and so little light. The world has still to discover the scope and vastness of its educational responsibilities. Most of its teaching in these matters hitherto has been less in the nature of enlightenment than strategic concealment; we have given the young neither knowledge nor training, we have restrained and baffled them and told them lies. And then we have inflamed them. We have abused their instinctive trust when they were children with stories of old Bogey designed to save us the bother that unrestrained youthful enterprise might cause, and with humorous mockery of their natural curiosity. Jocularities about storks and gooseberry bushes, sham indignations at any plainness of speech, fierce punishments of imperfectly realized offences, this against a background of giggles, knowing innuendo, and careless, exciting glimpses of the mystery, have constituted the ordinary initiation of the youth of the world. Right up to full age, we still fail to provide the clear elemental facts. Our young men do not know for certain whether continence is healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible; the sex is still assured with all our power of assurance, that the only pure and proper life for it is a sexless one. Until at last the brightest of the young have been obliged to get down to the bare facts in themselves and begin again at the beginning....

So Joan, co-Heiress of the Ages with Peter, found that because of her defaulting trustees, because we teachers, divines, writers and the like have shirked what was disagreeable and difficult and unpopular, she inherited nothing but debts and dangers. She had not even that touching faith in Nature which sustained the generation of Jean Jacques Rousseau. She had to set about her problem with Peter as though he and she were Eve and Adam in a garden overrun 495with weeds and thorns into which God had never come.

Joan was too young yet to have developed the compensating egotism of thwarted femininity. She saw Peter without delusions. He was a bigger and cleverer creature than herself; he compelled her respect. He had more strength, more invention, more initiative, and a relatively tremendous power of decision. And at the same time he was weak and blind and stupid. His flickering, unstable sensuousness, his light adventurousness and a certain dishonesty about women, filled her with a comprehensive pity and contempt. There was a real difference not merely in scale but in nature between them. It was clear to her now that the passionate and essential realities of a woman’s life are only incidental to a man. But on the other hand there were passionate and essential realities for Peter that made her own seem narrow and self-centred. She knew far more of his mental life than Oswald did. She knew that he had an intense passion for clear statement, he held to scientific and political judgments with a power altogether deeper and greater than she did; he cared for them and criticized them and polished them, like weapons that had been entrusted to him. Beneath his debonair mask he was growing into a strong and purposeful social and mental personality. She perceived that he was only in the beginning of his growth—if he came on no misadventure, if he did no............