She looked understandably annoyed. Coker himself had been annoyed from the time he came in. She said:
“I don’t see why you need to pour all your contempt for women onto me—just because of one dirty old engine.”
Coker raised his eyes.
“Great God! And here have I been explaining that women have as many brains as anyone else, if they’d only take the trouble to use them.”
“You said we were all petty and vain. That wasn’t at all a nice thing to say.”
“I’m not trying to say nice things. And what I meant was that in the world that has vanished women had a vested interest in acting the part of parasites.”
“And all that just because I don’t happen to know anything about a smelly, noisy engine.”
“Hell!” said Coker. “Just drop that engine a minute, will you.”
“Then why——”
“Listen,” said Coker patiently. “If you have a baby, do you want him to grow up to be a savage or a civilized man?”
“A civilized man, of course.”
“Well, then, you have to see to it that he has civilized surroundings to do it in. The standards he’ll learn, he’ll learn from us. We’ve all got to understand as much as we can, and live as intelligently as we can, in order to give him the most we can. It’s going to mean hard work and more thinking for all of us. Changed conditions must mean changed outlooks.”
The girl gathered up her mending. She regarded Coker critically for a few moments.
“With views like yours I should think you’d find Mr. Beadley’s party more congenial,” she said. “Here we have no intention of changing our outlook—or of giving up our principles. That’s why we separated from the other party. So if the ways of decent, respectable people are not good enough for you, I should think you’d better go somewhere else.” And with a sound very like a sniff, she walked away.
Coker watched her leave. When the door closed he expressed his feelings with a fish porter’s fluency. I laughed.
“What did you expect?” I said. “You prance in and address the girl as if she were a reactionary debating society—and responsible for the whole western social system as well. And then you’re surprised when she’s huffed.”
“You’d think she’d be reasonable,” he muttered.
“Most people aren’t, even though they’d protest that they are. They prefer to be coaxed or wheedled, or even driven. That way they never make a mistake: if there is one, it’s always due to something or somebody else. This going headlong for things is a mechanistic view, and people in general aren’t machines. They have minds of their own—mostly peasant minds, at their easiest when they are in the familiar furrow.”
“That doesn’t sound as if you’d give Beadley much chance of making a go of it. He’s all plan.”
“He’ll have his troubles. But his party did choose. This lot is negative,” I pointed out. “It is simply here on account of its resistance to any kind of plan.” I paused. Then I added: “That girl was right about one thing, you know. You would be better off with his lot. Her reaction is a sample of what you’d get all round if you were to try to handle this lot your way. You can’t drive a flock of sheep to market in a dead straight line, but there are ways of getting ’em there.”
“You’re being unusually cynical, as well as very metaphorical, this evening,” Coker observed.
I objected to that.
“It isn’t cynical to have noticed how a shepherd handles his sheep.”
“To regard human beings as sheep might be thought so by some.”