“But is it not a fact,” asked the Old Maid, “that the best men and even the wisest are those who have held women in most esteem?  Do we not gauge civilization by the position a nation accords to its women?”

“In the same way as we judge them by the mildness of their laws, their tenderness for the weak.  Uncivilised man killed off the useless numbers of the tribe; we provide for them hospitals, almshouses.  Man’s attitude towards woman proves the extent to which he has conquered his own selfishness, the distance he has travelled from the law of the ape:  might is right.

“Please don’t misunderstand me,” pleaded the Philosopher, with a nervous glance towards the lowering eyebrows of the Girton Girl.  “I am not saying for a moment woman is not the equal of man; indeed, it is my belief that she is.  I am merely maintaining she is not his superior.  The wise man honours woman as his friend, his fellow-labourer, his complement.  It is the fool who imagines her unhuman.”

“But are we not better,” persisted the Old Maid, “for our ideals?  I don’t say we women are perfect—­please don’t think that.  You are not more alive to our faults than we are.  Read the women novelists from George Eliot downwards.  But for your own sake—­is it not well man should have something to look up to, and failing anything better—?”

“I draw a very wide line,” answered the Philosopher, “between ideals and delusions.  The ideal has always helped man; but that belongs to the land of his dreams, his most important kingdom, the kingdom of his future.  Delusions are earthly structures, that sooner or later fall about his ears, blinding him with dust and dirt.  The petticoat-governed country has always paid dearly for its folly.”

“Elizabeth!” cried the Girton Girl.  “Queen Victoria!”

“Were ideal sovereigns,” returned the Philosopher, “leaving the government of the country to its ablest men.  France under its Pompadours, the Byzantine Empire under its Theodoras, are truer examples of my argument.  I am speaking of the unwisdom of assuming all women to be perfect.  Belisarius ruined himself and his people by believing his own wife to be an honest woman.”

“But chivalry,” I argued, “has surely been of service to mankind?”

“To an immense extent,” agreed the Philosopher.  “It seized a natural human passion and turned it to good uses.  Then it was a reality.  So once was the divine right of kings, the infallibility of the Church, for cumbering the ground with the lifeless bodies of which mankind has paid somewhat dearly.  Not its upstanding lies—­ they can be faced and defeated—­but its dead truths are the world’s stumbling-blocks.  To the man of war and rapine, trained in cruelty and injustice, the woman was the one thing that spoke of the joy of yielding.  Woman, as compared with man, was then an angel:  it was no mere form of words.  All the tender offices of life were in her hands.