Women in a Modern Utopia - Page 2

"Oh! They're there still. It's we that have come hither."

"Of course. I forgot. But still---- You know, there was an avenue of
little trees along this quay with seats, and she was sitting looking
out upon the lake.... I hadn't seen her for ten years."

He looks about him still a little perplexed. "Now we are here," he
says, "it seems as though that meeting and the talk we had must have
been a dream."

He falls musing.

Presently he says: "I knew her at once. I saw her in profile. But,
you know, I didn't speak to her directly. I walked past her seat and
on for a little way, trying to control myself.... Then I turned back
and sat down beside her, very quietly. She looked up at me.
Everything came back--everything. For a moment or so I felt I was
going to cry...."

That seems to give him a sort of satisfaction even in the
reminiscence.

"We talked for a time just like casual acquaintances--about the view
and the weather, and things like that."

He muses again.

"In Utopia everything would have been different," I say.

"I suppose it would."

He goes on before I can say anything more.

"Then, you know, there was a pause. I had a sort of intuition that
the moment was coming. So I think had she. You may scoff, of course,
at these intuitions----"

I don't, as a matter of fact. Instead, I swear secretly. Always this
sort of man keeps up the pretence of highly distinguished and
remarkable mental processes, whereas--have not I, in my own
composition, the whole diapason of emotional fool? Is not the
suppression of these notes my perpetual effort, my undying despair?
And then, am I to be accused of poverty?

But to his story.

"She said, quite abruptly, 'I am not happy,' and I told her, 'I knew
that the instant I saw you.' Then, you know, she began to talk to me
very quietly, very frankly, about everything. It was only afterwards
I began to feel just what it meant, her talking to me like that."

I cannot listen to this!

"Don't you understand," I cry, "that we are in Utopia. She may be
bound unhappily upon earth and you may be bound, but not here. Here
I think it will be different. Here the laws that control all these
things will be humane and just. So that all you said and did, over
there, does not signify here--does not signify here!"

He looks up for a moment at my face, and then carelessly at my
wonderful new world.

"Yes," he says, without interest, with something of the tone of an
abstracted elder speaking to a child, "I dare say it will be all
very fine here." And he