Eve found it difficult to begin. She doubted whether this woman could distinguish the subtle emotional colour shades, but in this she was mistaken. She soon discovered that Mrs. Falconer was as experienced as a sympathetic Romish priest, yet the older woman seemed to look at life objectively, and to read all its permutations and combinations as a mathematician may be able to read music at sight. “You have just worked out all the old conclusions, but there is nothing like working out a thing for oneself. It is like touching, seeing, tasting. I suppose it has made you one of the so-called fanatics?” “I want things altered!” “To what extent?” “I want the divorce law made equal, and I want divorce made easier. I want commercial equality. I want it understood that an unmarried woman who has a child shall not be made to carry all the supposed disgrace!” Mrs. Falconer turned in her chair. Her face was in the shadow, and Eve could not see her eyes very plainly, but she felt that she was being looked at by a woman who regarded her views as rather crude. “I should like you to try and think in the future, not only in the present.” “I have tried that, but it all seems so chaotic.” “I suppose you know that there are certain life groups where the feminine element is dominant?” “You mean spiders and bees?” “Exactly! It is my particular belief that woman had her period of dominance and lost it. It has been a male world, so far as humanity is concerned, for a good many thousand years. And what has European man given us? Factories, mechanics, and the commercial age. I think we can do better than that.” “You mean that we must make woman the dominant force?” “Isn’t that obvious?” It was obvious, splendidly obvious, when one had the thorough audacity to regard it in that light. “But how——” “By segregating the sexes, massing ourselves against the men, by refusing them everything that they desire as men. We shall use the political machinery as well. Man is the active principle, woman more passive, but passivity must win if it remains obdurate. Why have women always surrendered or sold themselves? Haven’t we that in us which gives us the right to rule?” “Motherhood?” “Yes, motherhood! We are the true creators.” “But men——” “The best of them shall serve.” “And how can you be sure of persuading all women to mass themselves into one sisterhood?” “That is just the problem we have to deal with. It will be solved so soon as the ordinary woman is taught to think woman’s thought.” Eve lay mute, thinking. It was very easy to theorise on these lines, but what about human nature? Could one count, even in the distant future, on the ordered solidarity of a whole sex? Would every woman be above her own impulses, above the lure of the emotions? It seemed to Eve that Mrs. Falconer who talked of developments as being obvious, was overlooking the most obvious of opponents—Nature. “But do you think that men will ever accept such a state of things?”