“I would sooner do any one thing myself than read about any twenty,” she observed. “I should hate to get my experiences secondhand, already digested for me, just as I should hate to wear secondhand clothes or eat peptonized food. They’ve got to be mine, and I’ve got to do them--I mean digest them--myself.” Oliver refused port, and took a very little coffee with a good deal of hot milk in it. “Considering Nature has been making men and women for so many million years, it’s odd how often she makes mistakes about them,” he said. “She constantly puts them into the wrong envelope: she puts a baby girl into a baby boy’s envelope, and a baby boy into a baby girl’s. You ought to have been a boy, Alice, and I ought to have been a girl.” Alice could not resist another walnut or two, and the crashings began again. “That may be true,” she said; “but that’s not really the point. A woman may be a real woman and yet want to do things herself. The real mistake that Nature makes is to give people arms and legs and a quantity of good red blood, and not give them the desire of using them.” “Or to give them an imagination without the desire of using it,” remarked Oliver. “I’m glad I have none,” said Alice firmly. “I never imagine what a thing is going to be like. I go and do the thing, and then I know.” They passed into the drawing-room next door, which seemed to bear out Oliver’s criticism on Nature’s mistakes, because the room had been furnished and decorated in accordance with his tastes, and with one exception was completely a woman’s room. Everything in it was soft and shaded and screened sideways and draped. But in one corner was a turning-lathe with an unshaded electric light directly over it.