"Abbott, Edwin A - Flatland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abbott Edwin A)

consequently wholly devoid of brainpower, and have neither reflection,
judgment nor forethought, and hardly any memory. Hence, in their fits
of fury, they remember no claims and recognize no distinctions. I
have actually known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole
household, and half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the
fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her husband and
children.
Obviously then a Woman is not to be irritated as long as she is in
a position where she can turn round. When you have them in their
apartments -- which are constructed with a view to denying them that
power -- you can say and do what you like; for they are then wholly
impotent for mischief, and will not remember a few minutes hence the
incident for which they may be at this moment threatening you with
death, nor the promises which you may have found it necessary to make
in order to pacify their fury.
On the whole we got on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations,
except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of
tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times
indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of
their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and
seasonable simulations, these reckless creatures too often neglect the
prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their
wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse
immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for
literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which
the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The
result is massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it
eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by
many of our Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded
as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant
population, and nipping Revolution in the bud.
Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular
families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with
you in Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of
slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily little
harmony of tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the FCircles
has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort. In every Circular
or Polygonal household it has been a habit from time immemorial -- and
now has become a kind of instinct among the women of our higher
classes -- that the mothers and daughters should constantly keep their
eyes and mouths towards their husband and his male friends; and for a
lady in a family of distinction to turn her back upon her husband
would be regarded as a kind of portent, involving loss of _status._
But, as I shall soon shew, this custom, though it has the advantage of
safety, is not without disadvantages.
In the house of the Working Man or respectable Tradesman -- where
the wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband, while pursuing
her household avocations -- there are at least intervals of quiet,
when the wife is neither seen nor heard, except for the humming sound
of the continuous Peace-cry; but in the homes of the upper classes