You must take me quite seriously.
I am your guardian; and it is my duty to improve your mind.
ANN.
The love compact is over, then, is it?
I suppose you grew tired of me?
TANNER.
No; but the moral passion made our childish relations impossible.
A jealous sense of my new individuality arose in me.
ANN.
You hated to be treated as a boy any longer.
Poor Jack!
TANNER.
Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old footing.
I had become a new person; and those who knew the old person laughed at me.
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
ANN.
You became frightfully self-conscious.
TANNER.
When you go to heaven, Ann, you will be frightfully conscious of your wings for the first year or so.
When you meet your relatives there, and they persist in treating you as if you were still a mortal, you will not be able to bear them.
You will try to get into a circle which has never known you except as an angel.
ANN.
So it was only your vanity that made you run away from us after all?
TANNER.
Yes, only my vanity, as you call it.
ANN.
You need not have kept away from ME on that account.
TANNER.
From you above all others. You fought harder than anybody against my emancipation.
ANN. [earnestly] Oh, how wrong you are!
I would have done anything for you.
TANNER.
Anything except let me get loose from you.
Even then you had acquired by instinct that damnable woman's trick of heaping obligations on a man, of placing yourself so entirely and helplessly at his mercy that at last he dare not take a step without running to you for leave.
I know a poor wretch whose one desire in life is to run away from his wife.
She prevents him by threatening to throw herself in front of the engine of the train he leaves her in.
That is what all women do.
If we try to go where you do not want us to go there is no law to prevent us, but when we take the first step your breasts are under our foot as it descends: your bodies are under our wheels as we start.
No woman shall ever enslave me in that way.
ANN.
But, Jack, you cannot get through life without considering other people a little.
TANNER.
Ay; but what other people?
It is this consideration of other people or rather this cowardly fear of them which we call consideration that makes us the sentimental slaves we are.
To consider you, as you call it, is to substitute your will for my own.
How if it be a baser will than mine?
Are women taught better than men or worse? Are mobs of voters taught better than statesmen or worse? Worse, of course, in both cases.
And then what sort of world are you going to get, with its public men considering its voting mobs, and its private men considering their wives?
What does Church and State mean nowadays?
The Woman and the Ratepayer.