Their next day's drive brought them to Oxford. It was vacation, and the colleges were empty. Only here and there a solitary figure of some lonely Fellow or Lecturer, lingering after the rest had gone, flitted across the lawns. The solitude of the place pleased the Professor. She could ramble with her pupil about the venerable courts and talk at her ease. 'Here,' she said, 'in the old days was once the seat of learning and wisdom.' 'What is it now?' asked her disciple, surprised. 'Is not Oxford still the seat of learning?' 'You must read--alas! you would not understand them--the old books before you can answer your own question. What is their political economy, their moral philosophy, their social science--of which they make so great a boast--compared with the noble scholarship, the science, the speculation of former days? How can I make you understand? There was a time when everything was advanced--by men. Science must advance or fall back. We took from men their education, and science has been forgotten. We cannot now read the old books; we do not understand the old discoveries; we cannot use the tools which they invented, the men of old. Mathematics, chemistry, physical science, geology--all these exist no longer, or else exist in such an elementary form as our ancestors would have been ashamed to acknowledge. Astronomy, which widened the heart, is neglected; medicine has become a thing of books; mechanics are forgotten----' 'But why?' 'Because women, who can receive, cannot create; because at no time has any woman enriched the world with a new idea, a new truth, a new discovery, a new invention; because we have undertaken the impossible.' The Professor was silent. Never before had Lord Chester seen her so deeply moved. 'Oh, Sacred Learning!' she cried, 'we have sinned against thee! We poor women in our conceit think that everything may be learned from books: we worship the Ideal Woman, and we are content with the rags of learning which remain from the work of Man. Yes, we are contented with these scraps. We will accept nothing that is not absolutely certain. Therefore we blasphemously and ignorantly say that the last word has been said upon everything, and that no more remains to be learned.' 'Mankind is surrounded,' the Professor went on as if talking to herself, 'by a high wall of black ignorance and mystery. The wall is for ever receding or closing in upon us. The men of the past pushed it back more and more, and widened continually the boundaries of thought, so that the foremost among them were godlike for knowledge and for a love of knowledge. We women of the present are continually contracting the wall, so that soon we shall know nothing, unless--unless you come to our help.' 'How can I help to restore knowledge,' asked the young man, 'being myself so ignorant?' 'By giving back the university to the sex which can enlarge our bounds.' Always the same thing--always coming back to the one subject.