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“Had I been in her place,” said the Girton Girl, “it would have been a separation I should have suggested. I should have hated him for the rest of my life.”

“For merely trying to agree with you?” I said.

“For showing me I was a fool for ever having wanted his affection,” replied the Girton Girl.

“You can generally,” said the Philosopher, “make people ridiculous by taking them at their word.”

“Especially women,” murmured the Minor Poet.

“I wonder,” said the Philosopher, “is there really so much difference between men and women as we think? What there is, may it not be the result of Civilisation rather than of Nature, of training rather than of instinct?”

“Deny the contest between male and female, and you deprive life of half its poetry,” urged the Minor Poet.

“Poetry,” returned the Philosopher, “was made for man, not man for poetry. I am inclined to think that the contest you speak of is somewhat in the nature of a ‘put-up job’ on the part of you poets. In the same way newspapers will always advocate war; it gives them something to write about, and is not altogether unconnected with sales. To test Nature’s original intentions, it is always safe to study our cousins the animals. There we see no sign of this fundamental variation; the difference is merely one of degree.”

“I quite agree with you,” said the Girton Girl. “Man, acquiring cunning, saw the advantage of using his one superiority, brute strength, to make woman his slave. In all other respects she is undoubtedly his superior.”

“In a woman’s argument,” I observed, “equality of the sexes invariably does mean the superiority of woman.”

“That is very curious,” added the Philosopher. “As you say, a woman never can be logical.”

“Are all men logical?” demanded the Girton Girl.

“As a class,” replied the Minor Poet, “yes.”

CHAPTER II

“What woman suffers from,” said the Philosopher, “is over-praise. It has turned her head.”

“You admit, then, that she has a head?” demanded the Girton Girl.

“It has always been a theory of mine,” returned the Philosopher, “that by Nature she was intended to possess one. It is her admirers who have always represented her as brainless.”

“Why is it that the brainy girl invariably has straight hair?” asked the Woman of the World.

“Because she doesn’t curl it,” explained the Girton Girl. She spoke somewhat snappishly, it seemed to me.

“I never thought of that,” murmured the Woman of the World.

“It is to be noted in connection with the argument,” I ventured to remark, “that we hear but little concerning the wives of intellectual men. When we do, as in the case of the Carlyles, it is to wish we did not.”

“When I was younger even than I am now,” said the Minor Poet, “I thought a good deal of marriage–very young men do. My wife, I told myself, must be a woman of mind. Yet, curiously, of all the women I have ever loved, no single one has been remarkable for intellect– present company, as usual, of course excepted.”

“Why is it,” sighed the Philosopher, “that in the most serious business of our life, marriage, serious considerations count for next to nothing? A dimpled chin can, and often does, secure for a girl the best of husbands; while virtue and understanding combined cannot be relied upon to obtain her even one of the worst.”

“I think the explanation is,” replied the Minor Poet, “that as regards, let us say, the most natural business of our life, marriage, our natural instincts alone are brought into play. Marriage–clothe the naked fact in what flowers of rhetoric we will- -has to do with the purely animal part of our being. The man is drawn towards it by his primeval desires; the woman by her inborn craving towards motherhood.”

The thin, white hands of the Old Maid fluttered, troubled, where they lay upon her lap. “Why should we seek to explain away all the beautiful things of life?” she said. She spoke with a heat unusual to her. “The blushing lad, so timid, so devotional, worshipping as at the shrine of some mystic saint; the young girl moving spell- bound among dreams! They think of nothing but of one another.”