“When a man has such a voice as that, it is impossible not to hear him,” said Malipieri, rising and answering before Sabina had time to speak.

Sabina rose, too, rather reluctantly.

“And of course you agreed with everything he said,” the Baroness replied.  “All anarchists do!”

“I beg your pardon.  I do not agree with him at all, and I am really not an anarchist.”

He smiled politely, and Sabina noticed with an unaccountable little thrill of satisfaction that the smile was quite different from the one she had seen in his face more than once while they had been talking together.  As for the deputy’s discourse, she had not heard a word of it.

The Baroness sat down on the sofa, and Sabina slipped away.  She was not supposed to be in society yet, as she was not quite eighteen, and there was certainly no reason why she should stay in the drawing-room that evening, while there were many reasons why she should go away.  The Baroness breathed an audible sigh of relief when she was gone, for it was never possible to predict what some excited politician might say before her in the heat of argument.

In the silence of her own room she sat down to think over the unexpected events of the evening.  Very young girls love to look forward to the moment when they shall be able to “think” of what has happened, after they have met men they are inclined to like, and who interest them.  But when the time really comes they hardly ever think at all.  They see pictures, they hear voices, they feel again what they have felt, they laugh, they shed tears all alone, and they believe they are thinking, or even reasoning.  Their little joys come back to them, the little triumphs of their vanity, and also all the little hurts their sensitiveness has suffered, and which men do not often guess and still more rarely understand.

There must be some original reason why all boys call girls silly, and all girls think boys stupid.  It must be part of the first manifestation of that enormous difference which exists between the point of view of men and women in after life.

Women are, in a sense, the embodiment of practice, while men are the representatives of theory.  In practice, in a race for life, the runner who jumps everything in his way is always right, unless he breaks his neck.  In theory, he is as likely to break his neck at the first jump as at the second, and the chances of his coming to grief increase quickly, always in theory, as he grows tired.  So theory says that it is safer never to jump at all, but to go round through the gates, or wade ignominiously through the water.  Women jump; men go round.  The difference is everything.  Women believe in what often succeeds in practice, and they take all risks and sometimes come down with a crash.  Men theorize about danger, make elaborate calculations to avoid it and occasionally stick in the mud.  When women fall at a stone wall they scream, when men are stuck in a bog they swear.  The difference is fundamental.  In nine cases out of ten it is the woman who enjoys the ecstatic delight of saying “I told you so,” and there are plenty of women who would ask no greater joy in paradise than to say so to their husbands for ever and ever.  Indeed, eternal reward and punishment could thus be at once combined and distributed in a simple manner.