Stirred by a faint _esprit de corps_ Miss Quincey asked him if he did not believe in the open door for women? He said, "It would be kinder to shut it in their faces." She threw in a word about the women's labour market--the enormous demand. He said that only meant that women's labour could be bought cheap and sold dear. She sighed. "But women must do something--surely you see the necessity?" He groaned. "Oh yes. It's just the necessity that I do see--the damnable necessity. I only protest against the preventable evil. If you must turn women into so many machines, for Heaven's sake treat them like machines. You don't work an engine when it's undergoing structural alterations--because, you know, you can't. Your precious system recognises no differences. It sets up the same absurd standard for every woman, the brilliant genius and the average imbecile. Which is not only morally odious but physiologically fatuous. There must be one of two results--either the average imbeciles are sacrificed by thousands to a dozen or so of brilliant geniuses, or it's the other way about." "Whichever way it is," said Miss Quincey, with her back, so to speak, to the wall, "it's all part of civilization, of our intellectual progress." "They're not the same thing. And it isn't civilization, it's intellectual savagery. It isn't progress either, it's a blind rush, an inhuman scrimmage--the very worst form of the struggle for existence. It doesn't even mean survival of the intellectually fittest. It develops monstrosities. It defeats its own ends by brutalising the intellect itself. And the worst enemies of women are women. I swear, if I were a woman, I'd rather do without an education than get it at that price. Or I'd educate myself. After all, that's the way of the fittest--the one in a thousand." "Do you not approve of educated women then?" Miss Quincey was quite shaken by this cataclysmal outbreak, this overturning and shattering of the old beacons and landmarks. He stared into the distance. "Oh yes, I approve of them when they are really educated--not when they are like that. You won't get the flower of womanhood out of a forcing-house like St. Sidwell's; though I daresay it produces pumpkins to perfection." What did he say to Miss Vivian then? Miss Quincey could not think badly of a system that could produce women like Miss Vivian. A cloud came over his angry eyes as they stared into the distance. "That's it. It hasn't produced them. They have produced it."