"Ugh!... But you don't know her: I'll take you round and introduce you: then you'll see for yourself. What about next Wednesday? or no, I'd better have them here.... Really it seems to me to amount to a public gloating? Their engagement was announced in the 'Times,' and ever since they've had nothing but advertisements--advertisements for wedding-cakes, dresses, veils, flowers, furniture, houses, and I don't know what not. The most private things--you wouldn't believe! It's as if every tradesman in London was looking at them as those shopmen looked at us when we bought the bed! But the moment _I_ ask a perfectly plain question, oh, the outraged modesty!... And what do you think her latest is? She hopes that if there are any children at all they'll be boys! Boys! Think of it!" "Ah, the Feminist Movement was bound to tell," said Cosimo. "If we're doing nothing else, we're driving the reactionaries into the opposite camp and making them declare themselves." "You think it's that?" "Think, my dear! I'm quite sure. We're driving them to their last defence. They know that woman's man's equal really, and that's why they're afraid. Why, look at your own case. You needn't go further than that. What's the good of theorizing when one knows? Take the chromosome. If woman's got one and man hasn't, then she has something he hasn't, and is actually his superior. You've a chromosome and I haven't, and look at us.... Yes, that's why the stick-in-the-muds nowadays all want boys. The female disability's going to be removed. You're removing it in your work; the advance-guard are removing it by having girls. It's all right as long as we know who's for us and who's against us. I don't blame your aunt for a single moment. I'm sorry for her, but that's a different thing." "Dorothy says she'd rather have boys, too," Amory mused. "Of course she would; so would Jellies; and making allowances for accidentals, Dot and Jellies are intellectually on a par, you know." ("Here's a piece that wants a stitch too.) But oh, Cosimo, isn't that going rather too far? Dorothy--and Jellies----!" "Not far enough," Cosimo averred stoutly. "The cases are exactly on all-fours. We know what Dorothy is, but we don't know what Jellies might not have been if she'd had the chance. You aren't allowing for Environment, you see...." And only the arrival of the bed, the bath and the chest of drawers cut short (three-quarters of an hour later) the most illuminating talk about Environment that Amory and Cosimo had ever had.