"But women must do something--surely you see the necessity?"

He groaned.

"Oh yes. It's just the necessity that I do see--the damnable necessity. I
only protest against the preventable evil. If you must turn women into so
many machines, for Heaven's sake treat them like machines. You don't work
an engine when it's undergoing structural alterations--because, you know,
you can't. Your precious system recognises no differences. It sets up the
same absurd standard for every woman, the brilliant genius and the
average imbecile. Which is not only morally odious but physiologically
fatuous. There must be one of two results--either the average imbeciles
are sacrificed by thousands to a dozen or so of brilliant geniuses, or
it's the other way about."

"Whichever way it is," said Miss Quincey, with her back, so to speak, to
the wall, "it's all part of civilization, of our intellectual progress."

"They're not the same thing. And it isn't civilization, it's intellectual
savagery. It isn't progress either, it's a blind rush, an inhuman
scrimmage--the very worst form of the struggle for existence. It doesn't
even mean survival of the intellectually fittest. It develops
monstrosities. It defeats its own ends by brutalising the intellect
itself. And the worst enemies of women are women. I swear, if I were a
woman, I'd rather do without an education than get it at that price. Or
I'd educate myself. After all, that's the way of the fittest--the one in
a thousand."

"Do you not approve of educated women then?" Miss Quincey was quite
shaken by this cataclysmal outbreak, this overturning and shattering of