And the day on which she did so was an evil day for those impostors--men. How should it not be an evil day for them? For men, who had had the world's affairs entirely in their hands in the past, still had them almost entirely in their hands to-day; and what had they made of things? Plainly, the best system they had been able to devise was a system in which it was possible for trustees to abscond with funds entrusted to them by godmothers. And not only that. Forgetting that a real man, Blake (unhappily now dead), had said that the sight of a robin in a cage set all heaven in a rage--totally ignoring that spiritual aspect of the matter--men, when asked for redress, callously weighed the cost of prosecution and the chances of securing a conviction, shrugged their shoulders, and (in Amory's case) apparently proposed to do nothing at all. Men, in a word, actually approved (though they pretended not to) of the organized robbery of poor girls. Next, whether they liked it or not, men must shoulder the responsibility for a state of things that permitted iniquitous contracts to be fluttered in the face of necessitous people, and that (in effect) ground the face of the poor because he (or in the present instance she) was poor. Males, as males, could not escape the onus of Mr. Hamilton Dix. Amory might have been more merciful had they made any attempt to do so, but they did not. They spoke of such things as everyday matters of business. They said that no humanly devisable system could be perfect, and told her, with their hypocritical "niceness," that the whole fabric of society could hardly be pulled down merely because a self-seeking individual here and there crept in and took advantage. But Amory knew that it was not a question of individuals. It was the underlying spiritual principle that was the whole point. That was radically wrong. Even men saw this, a few men, and called themselves Radicals, which was really a Latin word, meaning that they affected to go to the radix or root of the matter; but Amory knew where the root of the matter really lay. It lay in this artificial sex-distinction and in that frightfully laughable masculine theory of the "natural dominance of the male." But this was only a part of it, and not the finer part. It was in the finer part that the whole evil came to a head. How (to put the thing in a nutshell) did men (with the honourable exception of Cosimo and one or two others) treat art (namely, Amory's art)? There you had it!