were." A flush of excitement crept into her cheeks.

"Maternity," she said, "has been our undoing."

From that she opened out into a long, confused emphatic discourse on the
position of women, full of wonderful statements, while Constance worked
at her stencilling and Ann Veronica and Hetty listened, and Teddy
contributed sympathetic noises and consumed cheap cigarettes. As she
talked she made weak little gestures with her hands, and she thrust her
face forward from her bent shoulders; and she peered sometimes at Ann
Veronica and sometimes at a photograph of the Axenstrasse, near
Fluelen, that hung upon the wall. Ann Veronica watched her face, vaguely
sympathizing with her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and
her convulsive movements, and the fine eyebrows were knit with a faint
perplexity. Essentially the talk was a mixture of fragments of sentences
heard, of passages read, or arguments indicated rather than stated, and
all of it was served in a sauce of strange enthusiasm, thin yet
intense. Ann Veronica had had some training at the Tredgold College in
disentangling threads from confused statements, and she had a curious
persuasion that in all this fluent muddle there was something--something
real, something that signified. But it was very hard to follow. She did
not understand the note of hostility to men that ran through it all, the
bitter vindictiveness that lit Miss Miniver's cheeks and eyes, the
sense of some at last insupportable wrong slowly accumulated. She had no
inkling of that insupportable wrong.

"We are the species," said Miss Miniver, "men are only incidents.
They give themselves airs, but so it is. In all the species of animals
the females are more important than the males; the males have to please
them. Look at the cock's feathers, look at the competition there is