Women, in particular, had helped to keep it alive, fanning
its embers bravely. For many women, he found, dreamed his own dream,
and dreamed it far more sweetly. They were closer to essential
realities than men were. While men bothered with fuss and fury about
empires, tariffs, street-cars, and marvellous engines for destroying
one another, women, keeping close to the sources of life, knew, like
children, more of its sweet, mysterious secrets--the things of value
no one yet has ever put completely into words. He wondered, a little
sadly, to see them battling now to scuffle with the men in managing
the gross machinery, cleaning the pens and regulating ink-pots. Did
they really think that by helping to decide whether rates should rise
or fall, or how many buttons a factory-inspector should wear upon his
uniform, they more nobly helped the world go round? Did they never
pause to reflect who would fill the places they thus vacated? With
something like melancholy he saw them stepping down from their thrones
of high authority, for it seemed to him a prostitution of their sweet
prerogatives that damaged the entire sex.
'Old-fashioned bachelor, no doubt, I am,' he smiled quietly to
himself, coming back to the first reflection whence his thoughts had
travelled so far--the reflection, namely, that now at last he
possessed the freedom he had longed and toiled for.
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