“The thing most needed is for men to _recognise_ their illusion, to leave off while there is yet time their newest illusion of life as only process. Leave off trying to fit into their mechanical scheme a being who lives all the time in a world they have never entered. They seem incapable of unthinking the suggestions coming to them from centuries of masculine attempts to represent women only in relation to the world as known to men.” It was then he was angry. “How else shall they be represented?” “They _can’t_ be represented by men. Because by every word they use men and women mean different things.” Probably Italian women led men by the nose in the old way, the way of letting them imagine themselves the whole creation. And indeed the problem presently will be: how to save men from collapsing under their loss of prestige. Their awakening, when it comes, will make them pitiful. At present they are surrounded out in the world by women who are trying to be as much like them as possible. That will cease when commerce and politics are socialised. “Art,” “literature,” systems of thought, religions, all the fine products of masculine leisure that are so lightly called “immortal.” Who makes them immortal? A few men in each generation who are in the same attitude of spirit as the creators, and loudly claim them as humanity’s highest spiritual achievement, condoning in those who produce them any failure, any sacrifice of the lives about them to the production of these crumbling monuments. Who has decreed that “works of art” are humanity’s highest achievement? Daphne, preceded by her hurried voice; followed by her maid carrying a tray. She came swiftly in her manner of a small panting tug, eyes surveying ahead with gaze too wide for detail. “Put it there; near the lady.” Hitching herself into a chair, she sighed deeply, but not to attract attention, nor in the manner of a conversational opening. She had, without self-consciousness, the preoccupied air of one who snatches a tiresome necessary meal, grudging the expense of time. All her compact stillness was the stillness of energy momentarily marking time. Her face, distorted by efforts, mouth firmly closed, with a goodly bite of the stout little roll, was busily thinking and talking. Continuous. There was no cessation in her way of being, no dependence, none of the tricks of appeal and demand that make most children so quickly wearisome. Yet she was a baby sitting there; a lonely infant, rotund. Her face came round, so perfectly impersonal in its gravity that Miriam knew the irrepressible smile with which she met it for an affront, felt herself given up to the child’s judgment, ready to be snubbed. For a moment the round eyes surveyed her, deep and clear, a summer sea in shadow, and then, with her head a little butted forward in the way she had of holding it during her breathless sentences, she hurriedly swallowed her mouthful and cried: