“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.”
“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.”
