HENRY. Personally I can't imagine now that women have the upper hand why they don't keep up their number numerically. It is their only safeguard against our one day regaining the vote. It was their numerical majority plus adult suffrage which suddenly put them in the position to disfranchise men. And yet women are allowing their number to decline and decline until really for all practical purposes there seems to be about two men to every woman. EUGENIA. The laws of nature render our position infinitely stronger than that of men ever was. We mounted by the ladder of adult suffrage, but we kicked it down immediately afterwards. It will never be revived. Men had no tremors about the large surplusage of women as long as they were without votes. Why should we have any now about the surplusage of men? HENRY. Then there is another point. You talk so much about the importance of the physique of the race, and I agree with all my heart. But there are so few women to marry nowadays, and women show such a marked disinclination towards marriage till their youth is quite over, that half the men I know can't get wives at all. And those who do, have almost no power of selection left to them, and are forced to put up with ill-developed, sickly, peevish, or ugly women past their first bloom rather than remain unmarried and childless. EUGENIA. The subject is under consideration at this moment, but when the position was reversed in Edward the Seventh's time, and there were not enough men to go round, women were in the same plight, and men said nothing _then_ about the deterioration of the race. They did not even make drunkards' marriages a penal offence. Drunkards and drug-takers, and men dried up by nicotine constantly married and had children in those days. HENRY. I can't think the situation was as difficult for women as it is now for men. I was at Oxford last week, and do you know that during the last forty years only five per cent. of the male Dons and Professors have been able to find mates. Women won't look at them. EUGENIA. In the nineteenth century, when first women went to Universities and became highly educated, only four per cent. of them afterwards married, and then to schoolmasters. HENRY. And I assure you the amount of hysteria and quarrelling among the older Dons is lamentable.