Apart from the procreative necessity, was woman an unavoidable evil? The doctor’s untrammelled thoughts began to climb high, spin, nose dive and loop the loop. Nowadays we took a proper care of the young, we had no need for high birth rates, quite a small proportion of women with a gift in that direction could supply all the offspring that the world wanted. Given the power of determining sex that science was slowly winning today, and why should we have so many women about? A drastic elimination of the creatures would be quite practicable. A fantastic world to a vulgar imagination, no doubt, but to a calmly reasonable mind by no means fantastic. But this was where the case of Sir Richmond became so interesting. Was it really true that the companionship of women was necessary to these energetic creative types? Was it the fact that the drive of life towards action, as distinguished from contemplation, arose out of sex and needed to be refreshed by the reiteration of that motive? It was a plausible proposition: it marched with all the doctor’s ideas of natural selection and of the conditions of a survival that have made us what we are. It was in tune with the Freudian analyses. “SEX NOT ONLY A RENEWAL OF LIFE IN THE SPECIES,” noted the doctor’s silver pencil; “SEX MAY BE ALSO A RENEWAL OF ENERGY IN THE INDIVIDUAL.” After some musing he crossed out “sex” and wrote above it “sexual love.” “That is practically what he claims,” Dr. Martineau said. “In which case we want the completest revision of all our standards of sexual obligation. We want a new system of restrictions and imperatives altogether.” It was a fixed idea of the doctor’s that women were quite incapable of producing ideas in the same way that men do, but he believed that with suitable encouragement they could be induced to respond quite generously to such ideas. Suppose therefore we really educated the imaginations of women; suppose we turned their indubitable capacity for service towards social and political creativeness, not in order to make them the rivals of men in these fields, but their moral and actual helpers. “A man of this sort wants a mistress-mother,” said the doctor. “He wants a sort of woman who cares more for him and his work and honour than she does for child or home or clothes or personal pride.” “But are there such women? Can there be such a woman?” “His work needs to be very fine to deserve her help. But admitting its fineness?... “The alternative seems to be to teach the sexes to get along without each other.” “A neutralized world. A separated world. How we should jostle in the streets! But the early Christians have tried it already. The thing is impossible.”