‘In proportion to her size there is very little difference--about one-fiftieth--which, as brain power, can easily be made up by its finer texture,’ replied the doctor. ‘My belief is, that the wretched education women have hitherto received has been the sole cause of their keeping in the background, and that when they obtain a fair field they will come to the front. Don’t you agree with me, Miss Vere?’ ‘Certainly I do. See how they _have_ come to the front in almost every profession they have been allowed to enter, and in so short a time too. It will not be long now before women will support themselves entirely by their own labour, and be independent of marriage and men.’ ‘That will be a sad day for us,’ laughed Mr Fowler. ‘Do you think so? I don’t! I think we have sold ourselves for board and lodging long enough, and shall choose better when we are free to choose.’ ‘We have much to thank women for even now,’ said Dr Lennard. ‘The greatest geniuses the world has ever seen have repeatedly acknowledged that they owed all their moral and intellectual positions to their mothers. And it is a well-known fact, that there has never been an extraordinarily clever man born of a stupid mother, nor a giant of a little woman. And yet, in either case, the father may have been a fool or a dwarf.’ ‘How do you account, then, for woman’s inferior position?’ said Lovell. ‘Because she has been kept down!’ cried Miss Vere. ‘She has never been allowed to enjoy the sports, or follow the vocations, to which she has an equal right with man. She has been debarred from proper exercise by a set of prudes, who consider all out-door amusements unfitted for modest and womanly women, but which are in reality the very means most necessary to develop a woman’s brain, as well as her body. How then can men wonder if--if--’ ‘Let me assist you, Miss Vere,’ interrupted the doctor. ‘I think you were going to say that the corpuscles of your sex are devoid of the brain nourishing oxygen, and, if so, I quite agree with you.’ ‘Yes; that is what I meant, doctor; but I was too ignorant--fault of my feminine education again, you see--to find words in which to express myself.’ ‘Everything depends on the rearing of girls,’ remarked Dr Lennard. ‘Parents are careful to bring up their sons to healthful occupations and exercises, but their daughters are but too often doomed, by the injustice and short-sighted folly of the world, to a life of inertion.’ ‘Hardly _injustice_, doctor,’ said Mrs Vansittart; ‘it is their own choice. I am sure women have every liberty now-a-days.’ ‘Yes, _injustice_. The doctor is perfectly right. There is no other word for it,’ exclaimed Alice, suddenly bursting into eloquence. ‘So you are going to take up the gauntlet for your sex?’ laughed the doctor. ‘You do not look a very ill-used person, though, Miss Alice, with that rose-leaf complexion and peachy cheek.’