He was afraid of what might be Sir Roderick's unspoken judgment on Marjorie and the house she had made--though what was there to be afraid of? He was still more afraid--and this was even more remarkable--of the clear little judgments--hard as loose, small diamonds in a bed--that he thought Marjorie might pronounce on Sir Roderick. He had never disguised from himself that Sir Roderick was fat--nobody who came within a hundred yards of him could be under any illusion about that--and that he drank a good deal, ate with a cosmic spaciousness, loved a cigar, and talked and laughed with a freedom that sometimes drove delicate-minded new members into the corners remotest from the historical fireplace. Trafford knew himself quite definitely that there was a joy in Dover's laugh and voice, a beauty in his face (that was somehow mixed up with his healthy corpulence), and a breadth, a charity, a leonine courage in his mind (that was somehow mixed up with his careless freedom of speech) that made him an altogether satisfactory person. But supposing Marjorie didn't see any of that! Still, he was on the verge of bringing Sir Roderick home when a talk at the club one day postponed that introduction of the two extremes of Trafford's existence for quite a considerable time. Those were the days of the first enthusiasms of the militant suffrage movement, and the occasional smashing of a Downing Street window or an assault upon a minister kept the question of woman's distinctive intelligence and character persistently before the public. Godley Buzard, the feminist novelist, had been the guest of some member to lunch, and the occasion was too provocative for any one about Dover's fireplace to avoid the topic. Buzard's presence, perhaps, drove Dover into an extreme position on the other side; he forgot Trafford's new-wedded condition, and handled this great argument, an argument which has scarcely progressed since its beginning in the days of Plato and Aristophanes, with the freedoms of an ancient Greek and the explicitness of a modern scientific man. He opened almost apropos of nothing. "Women," he said, "are inferior--and you can't get away from it." "You can deny it," said Buzard. "In the face of the facts," said Sir Roderick. "To begin with, they're several inches shorter, several pounds lighter; they've less physical strength in footpounds." "More endurance," said Buzard. "Less sensitiveness merely. All those are demonstrable things--amenable to figures and apparatus. Then they stand nervous tensions worse, the breaking-point comes sooner. They have weaker inhibitions, and inhibition is the test of a creature's position in the mental scale."