“I don’t understand.”

“You want to be free and so forth, yes.  But you don’t particularly want to do the job that sets you free—­for its own sake.  I mean that it doesn’t interest you in itself.”

“I suppose not.”

“That’s one of our differences.  We men are like children.  We can get absorbed in play, in games, in the business we do.  That’s really why we do them sometimes rather well and get on.  But women—­women as a rule don’t throw themselves into things like that.  As a matter of fact it isn’t their affair.  And as a natural consequence, they don’t do so well, and they don’t get on—­and so the world doesn’t pay them.  They don’t catch on to discursive interests, you see, because they are more serious, they are concentrated on the central reality of life, and a little impatient of its—­its outer aspects.  At least that, I think, is what makes a clever woman’s independent career so much more difficult than a clever man’s.”

“She doesn’t develop a specialty.”  Ann Veronica was doing her best to follow him.

“She has one, that’s why.  Her specialty is the central thing in life, it is life itself, the warmth of life, sex—­and love.”

He pronounced this with an air of profound conviction and with his eyes on Ann Veronica’s face.  He had an air of having told her a deep, personal secret.  She winced as he thrust the fact at her, was about to answer, and checked herself.  She colored faintly.

“That doesn’t touch the question I asked you,” she said.  “It may be true, but it isn’t quite what I have in mind.”

“Of course not,” said Ramage, as one who rouses himself from deep preoccupations And he began to question her in a business-like way upon the steps she had taken and the inquiries she had made.  He displayed none of the airy optimism of their previous talk over the downland gate.  He was helpful, but gravely dubious.  “You see,” he said, “from my point of view you’re grown up—­you’re as old as all the goddesses and the contemporary of any man alive.  But from the—­the economic point of view you’re a very young and altogether inexperienced person.”

He returned to and developed that idea.  “You’re still,” he said, “in the educational years.  From the point of view of most things in the world of employment which a woman can do reasonably well and earn a living by, you’re unripe and half-educated.  If you had taken your degree, for example.”

He spoke of secretarial work, but even there she would need to be able to do typing and shorthand.  He made it more and more evident to her that her proper course was not to earn a salary but to accumulate equipment.  “You see,” he said, “you are like an inaccessible gold-mine in all this sort of matter.  You’re splendid stuff, you know, but you’ve got nothing ready to sell.  That’s the flat business situation.”

He thought.  Then he slapped his hand on his desk and looked up with the air of a man struck by a brilliant idea.  “Look here,” he said, protruding his eyes; “why get anything to do at all just yet?  Why, if you must be free, why not do the sensible thing?  Make yourself worth a decent freedom.  Go on with your studies at the Imperial College, for example, get a degree, and make yourself good value.  Or become a thorough-going typist and stenographer and secretarial expert.”