Was it her fancy, or did his manner imply that he wanted to sink that humiliating episode of the tea-party and begin again where they had left off? It might be so; his courtesy was so infinitely subtle. He had actually turned and was walking her way now. "And how is _Sordello?_" he asked, the tone of his inquiry suggesting that there was something seriously the matter with _Sordello_. "Getting on. Only fifty-six pages more." "You _are_ advancing, Miss Quincey--gaining on him by leaps and bounds. You're not overdoing it, I hope?" "Oh no, I read a little in the evenings--I have to keep up to the standard of the staff. Indeed," she added, turning with a sudden suicidal panic, "I ought to be at home and working now." "What? On a half-holiday? It _is_ a half-holiday?" "For some people--not for me." His eyes--she could not be mistaken--were taking her in as they had done before. "And why not for you? Do you know, you're looking horribly tired. Suppose we sit down a bit." Miss Quincey admitted that it would be very nice. "Hadn't you better put your cape on--the wind's changing." She obeyed him. "That's hardly a thick enough wrap for this weather, is it?" She assured him it was very warm, very comfortable. "Do you know what I would like to do with you, Miss Quincey?" "No." "I should like to pack you off somewhere--anywhere--for another three months' holiday." "Another three months! What would my pupils do, and what would Miss Cursiter say?" It was part of the illusion that she conceived herself to be indispensable to Miss Cursiter. "Confound Miss Cursiter!" Evidently he felt strongly on the subject of Miss Cursiter. He confounded her with such energy that the seat provided for them by the London County Council vibrated under it. He stared sulkily out over the park a moment; he gave his cuffs a hitch as if he were going to fight somebody, and then--he let himself go. At a blind headlong pace, lashing himself up as he went, falling furiously on civilization, the social order, women's education and women's labour, the system that threw open all doors to them, and let them be squeezed and trampled down together in the crush. He was ready to take the nineteenth century by the throat and strangle it; he squared himself against the universe. "What," said Miss Quincey, "do you not believe in equal chances for men and women?" She was eager to redeem herself from the charge of flightiness. "Equal chances? I daresay. But not unequal work. The work must be unequal if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work, with a pendulum for a piston, and a hairspring for steam." Miss Quincey timidly hinted that the question was a large one, that there was another side to it. "Of course there is; there are fifty sides to it; but there are too many people looking at the other forty-nine for my taste. I loathe a crowd."