Delia Blanchflower | Page 4

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 heard a few brutalities--but they couldn't keep their eyes off her, and in the end they cheered her. Most of the women were shocked, and wished they hadn't come, or let their girls come. And the girls themselves sat open-mouthed--drinking it in."
"Amazing!" laughed the Englishman. "Wish I had been there! Was it an onslaught upon men?"
"Of course," said his companion coolly. "What else could it be? At present you men are the gaolers, and we the prisoners in revolt. This girl talked revolution--they all do. 'We