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 physiologically fatuous.  There must be one of two results—­either the average imbeciles are sacrificed by thousands to a dozen or so of brilliant geniuses, or it’s the other way about.”

“Whichever way it is,” said Miss Quincey, with her back, so to speak, to the wall, “it’s all part of civilization, of our intellectual progress.”

“They’re not the same thing.  And it isn’t civilization, it’s intellectual savagery.  It isn’t progress either, it’s a blind rush, an inhuman scrimmage—­the very worst form of the struggle for existence.  It doesn’t even mean survival of the intellectually fittest.  It develops monstrosities.  It defeats its own ends by brutalising the intellect itself.  And the worst enemies of women are women.  I swear, if I were a woman, I’d rather do without an education than get it at that price.  Or I’d educate myself.  After all, that’s the way of the fittest—­the one in a thousand.”