ches--publicly--if the sight was
not too painful--three times a day.... But I don't think, mind you,
that I should let the sexes run about together. No. The fact behind the
sexes--is sex. It's no good humbugging. It trails about--even in the
best mixed company. Tugs at your ankle. The men get showing off and
quarrelling--and the women. Or they're bored. I suppose the ancestral
males have competed for the ancestral females ever since they were both
some sort of grubby little reptile. You aren't going to alter that in
a thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company,
never--except with only one man or only one woman. How would that be?...

"Or duets only?...

"How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps."... He became
portentously grave.

Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.

"I seem to see--I seem to see--a sort of City of Women, Ponderevo.
Yes.... A walled enclosure--good stone-mason's work--a city wall, high
as the walls of Rome, going about a garden. Dozens of square miles of
garden--trees--fountains--arbours--lakes. Lawns on which the women play,
avenues in which they gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing.
Any woman who's been to a good eventful girls' school lives on the
memory of it for the rest of her life. It's one of the pathetic things
about women--the superiority of school and college--to anything they get
afterwards. And this city-garden of women will have beautiful places
for music, places for beautiful dresses, places for beautiful work.
Everything a woman can want. Nurseries. Kindergartens. Schools. And no
man--except to do rough work, perhaps--ever comes in. The men live in a
world where they can hunt and engineer, invent and mine and manufacture,
sail ships, drink deep and practice the arts, and fight--"

"Yes," I said, "but--"

He stilled me with a gesture.

"I'm coming to that. The homes of the women, Ponderevo, will be set in
the wall of their city; each woman will have her own particular house
and home, furnished after her own heart in her own manner--with a little
balcony on the outside wall. Built into the wall--and a little balcony.
And there she will go and look out, when the mood takes her, and all
round the city there will be a broad road and seats and great shady
trees. And men will stroll up and down there when they feel the need
of feminine company; when, for instance, they want to talk about their
souls or their characters or any of the thin