Similarly on railways,
Keggo. The death rate among railway men is much higher in proportion,
over an average, than the rate in any other occupation. Porters
doing shunting, for instance, are always getting killed. Well,
women don't shunt trains so they don't get killed while shunting
trains, so there you are again, so to speak. The thing in a nutshell,
Keggo, is that, by contrast, men lead dangerous lives."
Keggo, who always was very alert in response, was here very long in
responding. Then she responded an extraordinary thing that Rosalie
afterwards remembered. She said slowly, "Oh, but Rosalie, it's very
dangerous to be a woman."
Rosalie questioned her.
Keggo said, "Rosalie, you've great ideas, and I think very shrewd
and very striking ideas, about the difference between men and women,
but there's this difference I think you haven't thought of--the
danger that women carry in themselves; right in them, here"--she
had a hand against her breast and she pressed it there--"born in
them, inerradicable, and that men have not. Men go into dangers but
they come out of them and go home to tea. That's what it is with
men, Rosalie. They can always get out. They can always come back.
They never belong to a thing, body and soul and heart and mind.
Rosalie, women do. That's their danger. That's why it is so very,
very dangerous being a woman. Women can't come back. They can't,
Rosalie. Look at me. They take to a thing and it becomes a craze,
it becomes an obsession, it becomes a drug.
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