Sylvia's maternal great-aunt had been a great lady out of a great
age, and incidentally a grim and grizzled veteran of the sex-war.
Her philosophy started from a recognition of the physical and
economic inferiority of woman, as complete as any window-smashing
suffragette could have formulated, but her remedy for it was a
purely individualist one, the leisure-class woman's skill in trading
upon her sex. Lady Dee did not use that word, of course--she would
as soon have talked of her esophagus. Her formula was "charm," and
she had taught Sylvia that the preservation of "charm" was the end
of woman's existence, the thing by which she remained a lady, and
without which she was more contemptible than the beasts.
She had taught this, not merely by example and casual anecdote, but
by precepts as solemnly expounded as bible-texts. "Remember, my
dear, a woman with a husband is like a lion-tamer with a whip!" And
the old lady would explain what a hard and dangerous life was lived
by lion-tamers, how their safety depended upon life-long
distrustfulness of the creatures over whom they ruled. She would
tell stories of the rending and maiming of luckless ones, who had
forgotten for a brief moment the nature of the male animal! "Yes, my
dear," she would say, "believe in love; but let the man believe
first!" Her maxims never sinned by verbosity.
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