“If there was an alternative we would take it,” she said. “But half of us women are brought up in such a lackadaisical way that there’s no use for us. When we have brains and opportunity we are generally physically handicapped. People don’t cut the woman who works now—they shrug their shoulders at her, and that’s worse! As for resources (they advise resources, you know, after one’s reached twenty-six), they are an outlet for wasted powers, a puny outlet, a mere compromise with failure! Oh! I’ve seen it again and again, dozens of times, capable, efficient girls brought up to be perfectly, daintily useless! After the schoolroom is over they get a dress allowance—and practise on the piano. Their heads must be full of something, so then come the rubbish—heaps of life, silly curates, silly extravagances, or piteously futile old maidhood! They keep us from being trained for anything else because they want us to marry, but all the other trainings help towards that the more one learns the more fit one is to teach. Self-reliance, good judgment and a sense of proportion are not out of place in a wife, and motherhood is only a word without them.” The doctor laughed. “Train your enterprising exceptions,” he said; “perhaps in time they’ll give the average woman a lift, but I don’t go all the way with you by any means. You over-estimate women because of one or two women you have met who stand mentally above their race. Average women at present haven’t brains enough to seize opportunities or to apply sensible educations. Domesticities or resources, and a silly curate or two, are just what they can appreciate, and good, solid hard work what they wish to avoid. I don’t say women lack brains, but as a rule they lack depth and continuity. They have very little of the mental soundness, even the clever ones, that the average man has as a matter of course. They don’t concentrate, and they’re altogether too personal to make much headway in the professions. You needn’t look as if you wished to annihilate me, Miss Muriel—I’ve no doubt you could—but I believe it to be a fact that women as a whole haven’t got physical or intellectual stamina enough for public life, and all the education and opportunities in the world will never give it to them!” “But we’re only beginning,” cried Muriel. “See how far we’ve got already.” “That’s the worst argument you have got against you,” said the doctor smiling. “You are _too_ quick to be natural; you work in spurts with reactions—growth, _real_ growth, is a much slower affair. But even granting you that you have been kept back, you simply can’t be _more_ mentally than you have physical strength for, and as long as you are labelled women, you’ll be labelled _weak_.” Muriel laughed. “You sound so horribly sensible,” she said, “and you leave us no power!”