The joy of making statements not drawn from things heard or read but plumbed directly from the unconscious accumulations of her own experience was fermented by the surprise of his interested attention, and the pride of getting him occasionally to accept an idea or to modify a point of view. It beamed compensation for what she was losing in sacrificing, whenever expression was urgent in her, his unmatchable monologue to her own shapeless outpourings. But she laboured, now and then successfully, to hold this emotion in subjection to the urgency of the things she longed to express. "_Women_, everybody knows nowadays, have made civilisation, the thing civilisation is so proud of--social life. It's one of the things I dislike in them. There you are, by the way, women were the first socialists." Havelock Ellis; and Emerson quoting Firdusi's description of his Persian Lilla ... but the impression, remaining more sharp and deep than the event, became one's own by revealing an inborn sharing of the view expressed. And waiting behind it now, was the proof, in life, as she had seen it. "I don't mean that idea of public opinion 'the great moulding and civilising force steered by women' that even the most pessimistic men admit, in horror." "What _do_ you mean, Miriam?" Patient scepticism. "Something quite different. It's amazing, the blindness in men, even in you, about women. There must be a reason for it. Because it's universal. It's no good looking, with no matter _what_ eyes, if you look in the wrong place. All that men have done, since the beginning of the world, is to find out and give names to and do, the things that were in women from the beginning, and that the best of them have been doing all the time. Not me." "_You_, Miriam, are an incorrigible _loafer_. I've a sneaking sympathy with _that_." "Well, the thing is, that whereas a few men here and there are creators, originators ... _artists_, women are this all the time." "My dear Miriam, I don't know _what_ women are. I'm enormously interested in sex; but I don't know _anything_ about it. Nobody does. That's just where we are." "Because you're a man and have no personality." "Don't talk nonsense, Miriam." "How can a man have personality?" "All right. _Men_--have no personality." "You see women simply as a sex. That's one of the proofs." "Right. Women have no sex." "You are doubtful about 'emancipating' women, because you think it will upset their sex-life." "I don't know _anything_, Miriam. No personality. No knowledge. But there's Miss Waugh, with a thoroughly able career behind her; been _everywhere_, done _everything_, my dear Miriam; come out of it all, shouting you back into the nursery." "I don't know her. Perhaps she's jealous, like a man, of her freedom. But the point is, there's no emancipation to be done. Women are emancipated." "Prove it, Miriam."