“In other words,” observed Nellie; “you would leave the present relationship of woman to Society unchanged, except that you would serve her out free rations.”

“No!  She should be absolutely mistress of her own body, and sole legal guardian of her own children.”

“Which means that you would institute free divorce, and make the family matriarchal instead of patriarchal; replace one lopsided system by another.”

“Give it him, Nellie,” put in Connie.  “I haven’t heard those notions of his for years.  I thought he had recanted long ago.”

“Well, yes!  But you needn’t be so previous in calling it lopsided,” said Stratton.

“It is lop-sided, to my mind!” replied Nellie.  “What women really want is to be left to find their own sphere, for whenever a man starts to find it for them he always manages to find something else.  No man understands woman thoroughly.  How can he when she doesn’t even understand herself?  Yet you propose to crush us all down to a certain pattern, without consulting us.  That’s not democratic.  Why not consult us first I should like to know?”

“Probably because they wouldn’t agree to it if you led the opposition, Nellie.  We are all only democratic when we think Demos is going our way.”  This from Ford.

Arty slipped quietly off the railing and went into the sitting-room.  Connie leaned back and watched him through the open door.  “He’s started to write,” she announced.  “He’s been terribly down lately so it’ll be pretty strong, poor fellow.”  She laughed good-naturedly; the others laughed with her.  “Go on, Nellie dear.  It’s very interesting, and I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Oh!  He won’t answer me,” declared Nellie, in a disgusted tone.

“I should think not,” retorted Stratton.  “I know your womanly habit of tying the best case into a tangled knot with a few Socratic questions.  I leave the truth to prove itself.”

“Just so!  But you won’t leave the truth about woman to prove itself.  You want us to be good mothers, first and last.  Why not let us be women, true women, first, and whatever it is fitting for us to be afterwards?”

“I want you to be true women.”

“What is a true woman?  A true woman to me is just what a true man is—­ one who is free to obey the instincts of her nature.  Only give us freedom, opportunity, and we shall be at last all that we should be.”

“Is it not freedom to be secure against want, to be free to——­”

“To be mothers.”

“Yes; to be mothers—­the great function of women.  To cradle the future.  To mould the nation that is to be.”

“That is so like a man.  To be machines, you mean—­well cared for, certainly, but machines just the same.  Don’t you know that we have been machines too long?  Can’t you see that it is because we have been degraded into machines that Society is what it is?”

“How?” questioned Stratton.