pupils do, and what would Miss
Cursiter say?"

It was part of the illusion that she conceived herself to be
indispensable to Miss Cursiter.

"Confound Miss Cursiter!"

Evidently he felt strongly on the subject of Miss Cursiter. He confounded
her with such energy that the seat provided for them by the London County
Council vibrated under it. He stared sulkily out over the park a moment;
he gave his cuffs a hitch as if he were going to fight somebody, and
then--he let himself go.

At a blind headlong pace, lashing himself up as he went, falling
furiously on civilization, the social order, women's education and
women's labour, the system that threw open all doors to them, and let
them be squeezed and trampled down together in the crush. He was ready to
take the nineteenth century by the throat and strangle it; he squared
himself against the universe.

"What," said Miss Quincey, "do you not believe in equal chances for men
and women?" She was eager to redeem herself from the charge of
flightiness.

"Equal chances? I daresay. But not unequal work. The work must be unequal
if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman
on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work,
with a pendulum for a piston, and a hairspring for steam."

Miss Quincey timidly hinted that the question was a large one, that there
was another side to it.

"Of course there is; there are fifty sides to it; but there are too many
people looking at the other forty-nine for my taste. I loathe a crowd."

Stirred by a faint _esprit de corps_ Miss Quincey asked him if he did not
believe in the open door for women?

He said, "It would be kinder to shut it in their faces."

She threw in a word about the women's labour market--the enormous demand.

He said that only meant that women's labour could be bought cheap and
sold dear.

She sighed.

"But women must do something--surely you see the necessity?"

He groaned.

"Oh yes. It's just the necessity that I do see--the damnable necessity. I
only protest against the preventable evil. If you must turn women into so
many machines, for Heaven's sake treat them like machines. You don't work
an engine when it's undergoing structural alterations--because, you know,
you can't. Your precious system recognises no differences. It sets up the
same absurd standard for every woman, the brilliant genius and the
average imbecile. Which is not only morally odious but