Delia Blanchflower | Page 4

like."
"Well, there seems to be a great woman-movement in your country.
Are you interested in it?"
"You mean--am I a feminist? Yes, I happen to dislike the word; but it
describes me. I have been working for years for the advancement of
women. I have written about it--and in the Scandinavian countries we
have already got a good deal. The vote in Sweden and Norway; almost
complete equality with men in Denmark. Professional equality, too, has
gone far. We shall get all we want before long?" Her eyes sparkled in
her small lined face.
"And you are satisfied?"
"What human being of any intelligence--and I am intelligent," she
added, quietly,--"ever confessed to being 'satisfied'? Our shoe pinched
us. We have eased it a good deal."
"You really find it substantially better to walk with?"
"Through this uncomfortable world? Certainly. Why not?"
He was silent a little. Then he said, with his pleasant look, throwing his
head back to observe her, as though aware he might rouse her
antagonism.
"All that seems to me to go such a little way."
"I daresay," she said, indifferently, though it seemed to him that she
flushed. "You men have had everything you want for so long, you have

lost the sense of value. Now that we want some of your rights, it is your
cue to belittle them. And England, of course, is hopelessly behind!"
The tone had sharpened.
He laughed again and was about to reply when the band struck up
Brahm's Hungarian dances, and talk was hopeless. When the music was
over, and the burst of clapping, from all the young folk especially, had
died away, the Swedish lady said abruptly--
"But we had an English lady here last year--quite a young girl--very
handsome too--who was an even stronger feminist than I."
"Oh, yes, we can produce them--in great numbers. You have only to
look at our newspapers."
His companion's upper lip mocked at the remark.
"You don't produce them in great numbers--like the young lady I speak
of."
"Ah, she was good-looking?" laughed Winnington. "That, of course,
gave her a most unfair advantage."
"A man's jest," said the other dryly--"and an old one. But naturally
women take all the advantage they can get--out of anything. They need
it. However, this young lady had plenty of other gifts--besides her
beauty. She was as strong as most men. She rode, she climbed, she
sang. The whole hotel did nothing but watch her. She was the centre of
everything. But after a little while she insisted on leaving her father
down here to over-eat himself and play cards, while she went with her
maid and a black mare that nobody but she wanted to ride, up to the
_Jagd-hütte_ in the forest. There!--you can see a little blue smoke
coming from it now"--
She pointed through the window to the great forest-clothed cliff, some
five thousand feet high, which fronted the hotel; and across a deep
valley, just below its topmost point, Mark Winnington saw a puff of
smoke mounting into the clear sky.

--"Of course there was a great deal of talk. The men gossipped and the
women scoffed. Her father, who adored her and could not control her in
the least, shrugged his shoulders, played bridge all day long with an
English family, and would sit on the verandah watching the path--that
path there--which comes down from the _Jagd-hütte_ with a spy-glass.
Sometimes she would send him down a letter by one of the Jager's boys,
and he would send a reply. And every now and then she would come
down--riding--like a Brunhilde, with her hair all blown about her--and
her eyes--_Ach_, superb!"
The little dowdy woman threw up her hands.
Her neighbour's face shewed that the story interested and amused him.
"A Valkyrie, indeed! But how a feminist?"
"You shall hear. One evening she offered to give an address at the hotel
on 'Women and the Future.' She was already of course regarded as half
mad, and her opinions were well known. Some people objected, and
spoke to the manager. Her father, it was said, tried to stop it, but she
got her own way with him. And the manager finally decided that the
advertisement would be greater than the risk. When the evening came
the place was _bondé_; people came from every inn and pension round
for miles. She spoke beautiful German, she had learnt it from a German
governess who had brought her up, and been a second mother to her;
and she hadn't a particle of mauvaise honte. Somebody had draped
some Austrian and English flags behind her. The South Germans and
Viennese, and Hungarians who came to listen--just the same kind of
people who are here to-night--could hardly keep themselves on their
chairs. The men laughed and stared--I