Anon. 'The Woman Who Wouldn't Do (She-Note Series),'

Punch, or the London Charivari, 108 (30 Mar 1895), 153.

The two were seated in an untrammelled Bohemian sort of way on the imperturbable expanse of the South Downs. Beneath them was a carpet of sheep-sorrel, its orbicular perianth being slightly depressed by their healthy weight. In the distance they noticed thankfully the saucer-shaped combes of paludina limestone rising in pleasant strata to the rearing scarp of the Weald. PERUGINO ALLAN was the gentleman's name. He had only met PSEUDONYMIA BAMPTON the day before, but already from mere community of literary interests they were life-long friends. She had reached the trysting-place first. All true modest women do this.

'Pseudonyma!' said Perugino, blushing easily to his finger-tips.

'Perugino!' said Pseudonyma, blushing to hers. It was early, of course, for Christian names, but then the Terewth had made them Free-and-Easy.

'Perugino!' said Pseudonyma, bringing her eyes back from the infinite to rest without affectation on her simple Greek chiton. 'I have often wanted to meet a real man who had written a book with a key to it on the back of the cover. Now tell me frankly some more beautiful things about our present loathsome system of chartered monogamy, so degrading to my sex. Talk straight on please, pages at a time. Never mind about Probability. Terewth is stranger than Probability; and the Terewth, you know, shall make you free!'

Perugino sank back into the spongy turf, leaning his cheek against an upright spike of summer furze, of the genus Ulex Europaeus. 'Some men,' he began, 'ignoble souls, 'look about' them before they marry. Such are calculating egoists. Pure souls, of finer paste, are, so to speak, born married. Others hesitate and delay. The difficulties of teething, a paltry desire to be weaned before the wedding, reluctance to being married in long clothes, the terrors of croup during the honeymoon -- these and other excuses, thinly veiling hidden depths of depravity, are employed to defer the divine moment. I have known men to reach the preposterously ripe age of one-and-twenty unwedded, protesting that they dare not risk their prospects at the Bar. These men can never mate like the birds, never be guide-posts to point humanity along the path of Terewth.'

'But,' interrupted Pseudonyma, rose-red to her quivering finger-tips with shame at the bare mention of marriage; 'but I thought you disapproved of the debasing principle of wedlock.'

'Do not interrupt,' said Perugino, kindly; 'I will come to that two or three pages later on. To be prudent, I was going to say, is to be vicious and cruel. Of course, it is not given to all to be born married. But this natal defect one can easily remedy. I knew a young fellow who did. The indispensable complement crossed his path before it was too late. He was still at his preparatory school; he married the matron. True, there was disparity of age, but it was a step in the right direction; though the head-master, a man of common conventional ideas, gave the boy a severe rebuke.

'But to push on at once to contradictions. Marriage, I have said elsewhere, is a degrading system, nurtured under the purple hangings of the tents of iniquity. In my gospel Love, like Terewth, should be Free; ever moving on, moving on. Now, Italy is the home --'

'Ah!' cried Pseudonyma, 'Italy! That reminds me of sunburnt Siena. What a wonderful Peruguinesque chapter that was in your book. Like a leaf torn out of the live heart of BAEDEKER!'

'Italy,' continued Perugino doggedly, 'is the home of backgrounds. I would like everyone to have a background – a past, the more pasts the better. Is not that a beautiful thought? Ever moving on to something different!'

'That has been the dream of my childhood,' said Pseudonyma, her white Cordelia-like soul thrilled through and through with sacred convictions. A ripe gorse-pod burst in the basking sunlight. ('I never remember seeing sunlight bask before,' she thought.) A bumble-bee said something inaudible. 'But why,' she added, 'did you never give this pure sentiment to the world before? You who have written so many many books?'

'My child,' replied the artist, 'I was compelled to write down to the public taste. One must consider one's prospects. This, you will say, seems to clash with what I said before about calculating egoists. But profession and practice are ever divorced under our depraved system of civilisation. At last, having established myself, I rose superior to sordid avarice, and wrote for once solely to satisfy my own taste and conscience.'

'A noble sacrifice! said Pseudonyma, suppressing her dimples for the moment. 'As the physically weaker vessel, I could only have done it under an assumed name. But tell me of one difficulty which you have so cleverly avoided in your book. This question of the family. Will not a confusion arise in another generation when nobody quite knows who and how many his or her half-brothers and half-sisters are?'

'Pseudonyma!' said Perugino, and his voice broke in two places. 'I am pained. I had thought that you, so pure, so emancipate, would have had a soul above blithering detail. Besides, do you not see that in this way the whole world will eventually become one family? We may not live to see this Millennium, but future Fabians may. What we want is a protomartyr in the cause. SHELLEY promised well, but he ultimately reverted to legal wedlock. As for me, I have been deemed unworthy of the crown. I am, alas! happily married. But you, you are single; why should you not set to all your sister-slaves a high example of that martyrdom of which the glory, as well as the inconvenience, has been denied to me?'

'Ah, dear Perugino!' she cried, visibly affected for the third time to her finger-tips, 'must it ever be so? Profession, as you say, divorced from practice? Must one more noble name be added to the list of those that shock the world so fearlessly with their books and live such despicably blameless lives? I myself, too, am misleading in print. You judged me by my pseudonymous publications to be single and unscrupulous. But you were wrong. I also am unequal to the weight of that crown. How can I be your martyr in the cause -- I who these many years have worshipped the very dust on which my husband deigns to tread? Can you and I ever be forgiven for thus sinning against the light?'

Perugino rose to go, indignant, disillusioned. 'Et tu, Pseudonyma? he bitterly cried. (She had been at Girton and could follow the original.) 'Then I give you up. You are, I grieve to think, a woman who won't do.' And he made a she-note of it.