"Just so! But you won't leave the truth about woman to prove itself. You want us to be good mothers, first and last. Why not let us be women, true women, first, and whatever it is fitting for us to be afterwards?"

"I want you to be true women."

"What is a true woman? A true woman to me is just what a true man is-- one who is free to obey the instincts of her nature. Only give us freedom, opportunity, and we shall be at last all that we should be."

"Is it not freedom to be secure against want, to be free to----"

"To be mothers."

"Yes; to be mothers--the great function of women. To cradle the future.

To mould the nation that is to be."

"That is so like a man. To be machines, you mean--well cared for, certainly, but machines just the same. Don't you know that we have been machines too long? Can't you see that it is because we have been degraded into machines that Society is what it is?"

"How?" questioned Stratton.

"He knows it well, Nellie," cried Connie, clapping her hands.

"Because you can't raise free men from slave women. We want to be free, only to be free, to be let alone a little, to be treated as human beings with souls, just as men do. We have hands to work with, and brains to think with, and hearts to feel with. Why not join hands with us in theory as you do in fact? Do you tell us now that you won't have our help in the movement? Will you refuse us the fruit of victory when the fight is won?

If I thought you would, I for one would cease to care whether the Cause won or not."

"I, too, Nellie. We'd all go on strike," cried Connie.

"What is it to you whether women are good mothers or not? What objections can you have to our rivalling men in the friendly rivalry that would be under fair conditions? Are our virtues, our woman instincts, so weak and frail that you can't trust us to go straight if the whole of life is freely open to us? Why, when I think of what woman's life is now, what it has been for so long, I wonder how it is that we have any virtues left."

She spoke with intense feeling.

"What are we now," she went on, "in most cases? Slaves, bought and sold for a home, for a position, for a ribbon, for a piece of bread. With all their degradation men are not degraded as we are. To be womanly is to be shamed and insulted every day. To love is to suffer. To be a mother is to drink the dregs of human misery. To be heartless, to be cold, to be vicious and a hypocrite, to smother all one's higher self, to be sold, to sell one's self, to pander to evil pa.s.sions, to be the slave of the slave, that is the way to survive most easily for a woman. And see what we are in spite of everything! Geisner said he would sometimes be proud if he were an Englishman. Sometimes I'm foolish enough to be proud I'm a woman.

"Why should we be mothers, unless it pleases us to be mothers? Why should we not feel that life is ours as men may feel it, that we help hold up the world and owe nothing to others except that common debt of fraternity which they owe also to us? Don't you think that Love would come then as it could in no other way? Don't you think that women, who even now are good mothers generally, would be good mothers to children whose coming was unstained with tears? And would they be worse mothers if their brains were keen and their bodies strong and their hearts brave with the healthy work and intelligent life that everybody should have, men and women alike?"

"You seem to have an objection to mothers somehow, Nellie," observed Geisner.

"Oh, I have! It seems to me such a sin, such a shameful sin, to give life for the world that we have. I can understand it being a woman's highest joy to be a mother. I have seen poor miserable women looking down at their puny nursing babies with such unutterable bliss on their faces that I've nearly cried for pure joy and sympathy. But in my heart all the time I felt that this was weakness and folly; that what was bliss to the mother, stupefying her for a while to the hollowness and emptiness of her existence, was the beginning of a probable life of misery to the child that could end only with death. And I have vowed to myself that never should child of mine have cause to reproach me for selfishness that takes a guise which might well deceive those who have nothing but the animal instincts to give them joy in living."

"You will never have children?" asked Geisner.

"I will never marry," she answered. "There is little you can teach a girl who has worked in Sydney, and I know there are ideas growing all about which to me seem shameful and unwomanly, excepting that they spare the little ones. For me, I shall never marry. I will give my life to the movement, but I will give no other lives the pain of living."

"You will meet him some day, Nellie," said Connie.

"Then I will be strong if it breaks my heart." Ned often thought of this in after days. Just then he hardly realised how the girl's words affected him. He was so breathlessly interested. Never had he heard people talk like this before. He began to dimly understand how it touched the Labour movement.

"You will miss the best part of life, my dear," said Connie. "I say it even after what you have seen of that husband of mine."

"You are wrong, Nellie," said Geisner, slowly. "Above us all is a higher Law, forcing us on. To give up what is most precious for the sake of the world is good. To give up that which our instincts lead us to for fear of the world cannot but be bad. For my part, I hold that no door should be closed to woman, either by force of law or by force of conventionalism.

But if she claims entrance to the Future, it seems to me that she should not close Life's gate against herself."

"I would close Life's gate altogether if I could," cried Nellie, pa.s.sionately. "I would blot Life out. I would--oh, what would I not do?

The things I see around me day after day almost drive me mad."

There was silence for a moment, broken then by Connie's soft laugh.

"Nellie, my dear child," she observed, "you seem quite in earnest. I hope you won't start with us."

"Don't mind her, Nellie," said Josie, softly, speaking for the first time. "Connie laughs because if she didn't she would cry."

"I know that," said Nellie. "I don't mind her. Is there one of us who does not feel what a curse living is?"

Geisner's firm voice answered: "And is there one of us who does not know what a blessing living might be? Nellie, my girl, you are sad and sorrowful, as we all are at times, and do not feel yet G.o.d in all working itself out in unseen ways."

"G.o.d!" she answered, scornfully. "There is no G.o.d. How can there be?"

"I do not know. It is as one feels. I do not mean that petty G.o.d of creeds and religions, the feeble image that coa.r.s.e hands have made from vague glimpses caught by those who were indeed inspired. I mean the total force, the imperishable breath, of the universe. And of that breath, my child, you and I and all things are part."

Stratton took his cigar from his mouth and quoted:

"'I am the breath of the lute, I am the mind of man, Gold's glitter, the light of the diamond and the sea-pearl's l.u.s.tre wan. I am both good and evil, the deed and the deed's intent--Temptation, victim, sinner, crime, pardon and punishment.'"

"Yes," said Geisner; "that and more. Brahma and more than Brahma. What Prince Buddha thought out too. What Jesus the Carpenter dimly recognised.

Not only Force, but Purpose, or what for lack of better terms we call Purpose, in it all."

"And that Purpose; what is it?" Ned was surprised to hear his own voice uttering his thought.

"Who shall say? There are moments, a few moments, when one seems to feel what it is, moments when one stands face to face with the universal Life and realises wordlessly what it means." Geisner spoke with grave solemnity. The others, hardly breathing, understood how this man had thought these things out.

"When one is in anguish and sorrow unendurable. When one has seen one's soul stripped naked and laid bare, with all its black abysses and unnatural sins; the brutishness that is in each man's heart known and understood--the cowardice, the treachery, the villainy, the l.u.s.t. When one knows oneself in others, and sinks into a mist of despair, hopeless and heart-wrung, then come the temptations, as the prophets call them, the miserable ambitions dressed as angels of light, the religions which have become more drugged pain-lullers, the desire to suppress thought altogether, to end life, to stupefy one's soul with bodily pain, with mental activity. And if," he added slowly, "if one's pain is for others more than for oneself, if in one's heart Humanity has lodged itself, then it may be that one shall feel and know. And from that time you never doubt G.o.d. You may doubt yourself but never that all things work together for good."

"I do not see it," cried Nellie.

"Hush!" said Connie. "Go on, Geisner."

"To me," the little man went on, as if talking rather to himself than to the others. "To me the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness, the total Purpose I mean. G.o.d seeking to know G.o.d. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken. Art, the expression of that consciousness, the outward manifestation of the effort to solve the problem of Life.

Genius, the power of expressing in some way or other what many thought but could not articulate. I do not mean to be dogmatic. Words fail us to define our meaning when we speak of these things. Any quibbler can twist the meaning of words, while only those who think the thought can understand. That is why one does not speak much of them. Perhaps we should speak of them more."

"It is a barren faith to me," said Nellie.

"Then I do not express it well," said Geisner. "But is it more barren-sounding than utter Negation? Besides, where do we differ really?

All of us who think at all agree more or less. We use different terms, pursue different lines of thought, that is all. It is only the dullard, who mistakes the symbol for the idea, the letter for the spirit, the metaphor for the thought within, who is a bigot. The true thinker is an artist, the true artist is a thinker, for Art is the expression of thought in thing. The highest thought, as Connie rightly told us before you came, is Emotion."

"I recollect the Venus in the Louvre," interjected Harry. "When I saw it first it seemed to me most beautiful, perfect, the loveliest thing that ever sculptor put chisel to. But as I saw it more I forgot that it was beautiful or perfect. It grew on me till it lived. I went day after day to see it, and when I was glad it laughed at me, and when I was downhearted it was sad with me, and when I was angry it scowled, and when I dreamed of Love it had a kiss on its lips. Every mood of mine it changed with; every thought of mine it knew. Was not that Art, Nellie?"

"The artist in you," she answered.

"No. More than that. The artist in the sculptor, breathing into the stone a perfect sympathy with the heart of men. His genius grasped this, that beauty, perfect beauty, is the typifying not of one pa.s.sion, one phase of human nature, but of the aggregation of all the moods which sway the human mind. There is a great thought in that. It is 'the healthy mind in the healthy body,' as the sculptor feels it. And 'the healthy mind in the healthy body' is one of the great thoughts of the past. It is a thought which is the priceless gift of Greek philosophy to the world. I hold it higher than that of the Sphinx, which Ford admires so."

"What does the Sphinx mean?" asked Ned.

"Much the same, differently expressed," answered Ford. "That Life with us is an intellectual head based on a brutish body, fecund and powerful; that Human Nature crouches on the ground and reads the stars; that man has a body and a mind, and that both must be cared for."

"They had a strange way of caring for both, your Egyptians," remarked Nellie. "The people were all slaves and the rulers were all priests."