ing, obstructive obsession with sex.
It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the
sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations,
the first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant
proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief
interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and
her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do
that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these
demands was the master motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a little
while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from the
solitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so in
order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.... All that may have
been necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changed
and changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, AS WOMEN, is a
diminishing future.'

'Karenin?' asked Rachel, 'do you mean that women are to become men?'

'Men and women have to become human beings.'

'You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more than
sex in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take up
life differently. Forget we are--females, Karenin, and still we are a
different sort of human being with a different use. In some things we
are amazingly secondary. Here am I in this place because of my trick of
management, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands. That
does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is man
made; that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make
history, that you could nearly write a complete history of the world
without mentioning a woman's name. And on the other hand we have a
gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly loving
beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye for
behaviour. You know men are blind beside us in these last matters. You
know they are restless--and fitful. We have a steadfastness. We may
never draw the broad outlines nor discover the new paths, but in the
future isn't there a confirming and sustaining and supplying role for
us? As important, perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the
world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.'

'You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am not
thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish--the
heroine, the sexual heroine