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 everywhere, except among humans.  The stags and oxen and things all have to fight for us, everywhere.  Only in man is the male made the most important.  And that happens through our maternity; it’s our very importance that degrades us.

“While we were minding the children they stole our rights and liberties.  The children made us slaves, and the men took advantage of it.  It’s—­Mrs. Shalford says—­the accidental conquering the essential.  Originally in the first animals there were no males, none at all.  It has been proved.  Then they appear among the lower things”—­she made meticulous gestures to figure the scale of life; she seemed to be holding up specimens, and peering through her glasses at them—­“among crustaceans and things, just as little creatures, ever so inferior to the females.  Mere hangers on.  Things you would laugh at.  And among human beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and leaders; they owned all the property, they invented all the arts.

“The primitive government was the Matriarchate.  The Matriarchate!  The Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were told.”

“But is that really so?” said Ann Veronica.

“It has been proved,” said Miss Miniver, and added, “by American professors.”