fit for."

"Is it?" said Evadne.

"Yes. And they don't know arithmetic enough to do that properly."

"Don't they? why?" she asked.

"Because they have no brains," he answered.

"But some women have been clever," she ventured seriously.

"Yes, of course; exceptional women. But you can't argue from exceptional
women."

"Then ordinary women have no brains, and cannot learn arithmetic?" she
concluded.

"Precisely," he answered irritably. Such signs of intelligence always did
irritate him, somehow.

Evadne found food for reflection in these remarks. She had done a certain
amount of arithmetic herself in the schoolroom, and had never found it
difficult, but then she had not gone far enough, perhaps. And she went at
once to get a Colenso or a Barnard Smith to see. She found them more
fascinating when she attacked them of her own free will and with all her
intelligence than she had done when necessity, in the shape of her
governess, forced her to pay them some attention, and she went through
them both in a few weeks at odd times, and then asked her father's advice
about a book on advanced mathematics.