“The present revolt of woman,” continued the Minor Poet, “will be looked back upon by the historian of the future as one of the chief factors in our social evolution.  The ’home’—­the praises of which we still sing, but with gathering misgiving—­depended on her willingness to live a life of practical slavery.  When Adam delved and Eve span—­Adam confining his delving to the space within his own fence, Eve staying her spinning-wheel the instant the family hosiery was complete—­then the home rested upon the solid basis of an actual fact.  Its foundations were shaken when the man became a citizen and his interests expanded beyond the domestic circle.  Since that moment woman alone has supported the institution.  Now she, in her turn, is claiming the right to enter the community, to escape from the solitary confinement of the lover’s castle.  The ‘mansions,’ with common dining-rooms, reading-rooms, their system of common service, are springing up in every quarter; the house, the villa, is disappearing.  The story is the same in every country.  The separate dwelling, where it remains, is being absorbed into a system.  In America, the experimental laboratory of the future, the houses are warmed from a common furnace.  You do not light the fire, you turn on the hot air.  Your dinner is brought round to you in a travelling oven.  You subscribe for your valet or your lady’s maid.  Very soon the private establishment, with its staff of unorganised, quarrelling servants, of necessity either over or underworked, will be as extinct as the lake dwelling or the sandstone cave.”

“I hope,” said the Woman of the World, “that I may live to see it.”

“In all probability,” replied the Minor Poet, “you will.  I would I could feel as hopeful for myself.”

“If your prophecy be likely of fulfilment,” remarked the Philosopher, “I console myself with the reflection that I am the oldest of the party.  Myself; I never read these full and exhaustive reports of the next century without revelling in the reflection that before they can be achieved I shall be dead and buried.  It may be a selfish attitude, but I should be quite unable to face any of the machine-made futures our growing guild of seers prognosticate.  You appear to me, most of you, to ignore a somewhat important consideration—­namely, that mankind is alive.  You work out your answers as if he were a sum in rule-of-three:  ’If man in so many thousands of years has done so much in such a direction at this or that rate of speed, what will he be doing—?’ and so on.  You forget he is swayed by impulses that can enter into no calculation—­drawn hither and thither by powers that can never be represented in your algebra.  In one generation Christianity reduced Plato’s republic to an absurdity.  The printing-press has upset the unanswerable conclusions of Machiavelli.”

“I disagree with you,” said the Minor Poet.

“The fact does not convince me of my error,” retorted the Philosopher.