Quote image editor
“Lady Darvish nodded sagely to herself. She believed, quite frankly and unapologetically, that women were superior to men; it seemed merely obvious to her that women’s minds were subtler than men’s, more flexible, more capacious, more resilient, and more socially and circumstantially astute, and to those who might doubt that a disparity between the sexes existed in the first place, or indeed, that one could speak of two such categories at all, she would only shake her head and laugh, and say emphatically that raising her daughter could not have been more different from raising her two sons: ‘They were like two different species,’ she would say, ‘I mean—I’m telling you. Talk about “Men are from Mars”!’ But it was as a consequence of her belief in the supremacy of her own sex that she held men to far lower standards than she did women, and so tended to be rather softer on them; with Sir Owen—as with her sons, and with her father before he’d died—her attitude of condescension could take the form of a cosseting, and even an obsequious, indulgence.” — Eleanor Catton