"Well, what did she expect?" Honey asked.
"That I'd let her keep them - that I'd let her fly the way Peachy did!
Or - what do you suppose she suggested? - that I cut them off now."
"Well, what was her idea in that?" Billy's tone was the acme of
perplexity.
"That as long as I wouldn't let her keep them after she had attained her
growth, she might as well not have them at all."
Billy laughed. "That's a woman's reasoning all right, all right. Why, it
would destroy half Angela's charm in my eyes. That little fluttering
flight of hers, half on the ground, half in the air, is so lovely, so
engaging, so endearing - - . But of course letting her fly high would be
- ."
"Absurd," Ralph interrupted.
"Dangerous," Honey interpolated.
"Unwomanly," Pete added.
"Immodest," Billy concluded.
"Well, thank God it's all over," Ralph went on. "But, as I say, I give
up guessing what's changed her, unless it's the principle that constant
dropping wears away the stone. Oscar Wilde had the answer. They're
sphinxes without secrets. They do anything that occurs to them and for
no particular reason. I get along with, them only by laying down the law
and holding them to it. And I reckon they've got that idea firmly fixed
in their minds now - that they're to stay where we put them."
Honey wriggled as if in discomfort. "Seems to me, Ralph, you take a
pretty cold-blooded view of the situation. I guess I don't go very far
with you. Not that I pretend to understand women. I don't. My system
with them is to give them anything they ask, within reason, of course,
to keep them busy and happy, buy them presents, soft-soap them, jolly
them along. I suppose that personally, I wouldn't have minded their
flying a little every afternoon, as long as they took the proper care. I
mean by that, not to fly too far out to sea or too high in the air and
never when we were at home, so long, in short, as they followed the
rules that we laid down for them. You fellows seem to have the idea if
we let them do that we'd lose them. But if there's one general
proposition fixed more firmly in my nut than any other, it is that you
can't lose them. But of course I intend always to stand by whatever
you-all say."
"I don't know," Billy burst in hotly, "which of you two makes me sickest
and which is the most insulting in his attitude towards women, you,
Ralph, who treat them as if they were household pets, or you, Honey, who
treat them as if they were dolls. In my opinion there is only one law to
govern a man's relation with a woman - the law of chivalry. To love her,
and cherish her, to do all the hard work of the world for her, to stand
between her and everything that is unbeautiful and unpleasant, to think
for her, to put her on a pedestal and worship her; to my mind that sums
up the whole duty of man to woman."