“They WERE, and that's better than doing”

Mrs. Hilbery’s “They WERE, and that's better than doing” condenses her longing for an idealized past in which women’s serene presence seemed more valuable than purposeful action. Spoken while she turns over old family photographs, the phrase becomes a measure of the distance between her generation’s image of feminine virtue and the labor, ambition, and political activity shaping the lives of younger women.

The phrase and its remembered ideal

Mrs. Hilbery imagines the young women she remembers at Melbury House, moving across the lawns in flounces and furbelows, followed by a monkey and a little black dwarf. She describes them as calm, stately, and imperial, devoted to being beautiful and kind. Her ships-with-white-sails comparison gives the ideal its defining quality: they held their course without shoving, pushing, or being fretted by small matters. “They WERE, and that's better than doing” is therefore not simply praise of idleness. It expresses her belief that a woman’s manner of being—her composure and benevolent presence—could itself be a meaningful contribution.

The photographs seem to confirm that belief. Their subjects appear dignified and calm, with faces that suggest they ruled their kingdoms justly and deserved affection. Some are extraordinarily beautiful and others powerfully ugly, but none seems dull or insignificant. The women’s crinolines and the men’s cloaks and hats give the images a distinct character; for Katharine, the album briefly restores a serene atmosphere and the distant sound of the sea. Yet she knows she must connect that past to the present. The phrase thus belongs to a scene in which remembrance offers an appealing order but cannot substitute for present responsibilities.

Against the work of the present

The contrast is embodied in Katharine herself. Though she dislikes literary self-expression and tends toward silence, her family has relied on her since childhood to counsel and sustain Mrs. Hilbery and to manage practical affairs. She orders meals, directs servants, pays bills, keeps the clocks approximately in time, and ensures that the vases hold fresh flowers. At the Hilberys’ house in Cheyne Walk, these tasks produce an orderly and harmonious home, while her mother’s more conspicuous character appears to predominate. Mrs. Hilbery calls this practical gift “poetry the wrong side out”: an aphorism that grants household management imaginative value even as it leaves the work largely unrecognized as labor.

Mary Datchet offers a different contrast. On alternate Wednesdays she lends her rooms to a society for free discussion, but insists on controlling the arrangements herself. After a hard day’s work, she moves furniture, clears tables, removes her mattress, and prepares coffee, crockery, and biscuits for the gathering. At the suffrage office she undertakes a large-scale scheme to organize public entertainments, attract Cabinet Ministers’ attention, and renew the campaign’s arguments. Her work is not a quiet background to other people’s lives: it is deliberate organization directed toward political change.

Ralph Denham challenges Mary’s methods, accusing her of getting trapped in a comfortable groove and attending too much to details. He urges her to travel, see more of the world, and reach for larger ideas; Mary surprises him by admitting that she, too, has begun to think she should go somewhere far away. Their exchange sharpens the question implicit in Mrs. Hilbery’s phrase. Is value found in a stable, sustaining presence, in organized work, or in a broader ambition that breaks out of familiar routines? The novel presents these alternatives through distinct lives rather than resolving them in a maxim.

A generational and political tension

The phrase also illuminates the difference between Mrs. Hilbery’s nostalgia and the public conditions confronting Mary and her colleagues. When a Parliamentary maneuver once again prevents women from gaining the vote, Mrs. Seal calls the defeat a setback to civilization and argues that the campaign must patiently continue. Mr. Clacton responds by proposing a more systematic operation: revised card-indexes, new leaflets, and a map of England marking the distribution of suffrage organizations. Mrs. Seal, in turn, frames the cause as a generational relay, with each generation taking up the work left by the last, and insists that it is a cause of humanity as well as of women.

Against this organized effort, “being” can sound like an alternative to political action; the novel’s surrounding details make the opposition more complex. Katharine’s household competence sustains a family whose visible center is her mother, while Mary’s organizing takes physical effort, office discipline, and repeated public work. The older ideal of feminine influence does not erase labor; it can make labor appear natural, personal, or almost invisible. Conversely, the suffrage office’s files, meetings, and campaigns make action conspicuous but subject to exhaustion, setbacks, and strategic disagreement.

Mrs. Hilbery’s words retain their force because they are both affectionate and limited. They capture the grace and dignity that Katharine sees in the old photographs, but they also belong to a retrospective vision that must be joined to the present. The phrase names an inheritance—the belief that presence and character can matter—while the lives around it ask what women must do, and what forms of work remain hidden, when being alone is no longer enough.