“Now that is scarcely hospitable. Moreover, I had saved up that to ask you. But I don’t mind committing myself, with the understanding that you are to supplement me in the matter. This gymnasium seems to me to stand for the idea of physical equilibrium. It means that you and the others are not willing to give up what the city seeks to force you to give up for the time. In the country I hope you lead such a life that the gymnasium would be absurd there. But in the city it is very different for all of us, but especially for you women. The clothes you usually wear here presuppose that you will suspend, while wearing them, the use or development of most of your muscles. Some of the time you will wear a bicycle skirt and ride a wheel. But the bicycle uses but one set of muscles. Your walking and dancing, with some tennis and an occasional run out to the links for golf, all leave the symmetrical development incomplete in some way. They do not include the immensely important element of climbing, for example. The gymnasium ought to fill in the chinks. I suppose it does. Then it makes you like it. Perhaps that is one of the best things it does.” “It does make me like it, because it makes me like myself. The gymnasium makes me feel good,—_good_, do you understand, not merely _well_.” “We often have been told that if we all were well we all should be good.” [Illustration] “I don’t suppose I am good enough to hurt, but it is nice to feel that way. Mind you, I don’t agree at all that women need the gymnasium any more than men do. I have three brothers, and I know some things. I know that the average man is just as much hampered by his clothes as the average woman. I really think he is hampered more, for he defers to his clothes more than a woman defers to hers. A woman’s management of her skirt at least gives her a certain amount of exercise, while a man’s horror of bagging his trousers at the knees has not a single physical compensation. It simply limits his movements.” “But a woman’s skirt limits her movements.” “I wouldn’t say that it limited them so much as it directed them.” “Perhaps you will tell me why most women are or seem to be pigeon toed.” “I can explain that. It is for the same reason that they waddle when they go up stairs. The reason is the skirt. I can illustrate by a diagram,” and she found a hoople and placed it on the floor. “That we shall say is Figure One. Now, I place here two dumb-bells. These we shall say are feet standing within the radius of the skirt. Now the point of freest action in stepping for the feet B and C obviously lies in the direction of A. Toward A the foot B can move in the longest line without striking the skirt. Hence in walking the tendency for one foot to follow the other in the direction of A and the centrifugal tendency of the toes. As women learn to wear shorter skirts or wear short skirts a greater proportion of the time the likelihood that they will be intoed will naturally decrease.”