his: That she should fulfil the functions assigned to her by Nature.
That she should rule the home and rear children. That she should be a
wife and a mother. That she should be gentle as men are rough, and, to
pirate the Americanism, as she rocked the cradle should rock the world."

"How about equality?" demanded Ford.

"Equality! What do you mean by equality? Is it equality to scramble with
men in the search for knowledge, narrow hipped and flat-chested? Is it
equality to grow coarse and rough and unsexed in the struggle for
existence? Ah! Let our women once become brutalised, masculinised, and
there will be no hope for anything but a Chinese existence."

"Who wants to brutalise them?" asked Ford.

"What would your women be like?" asked Nellie.

"Look out for Madame there, Stratton!" said George.

"What would my women be like? Full-lipped and broad-hearted, fit to love
and be loved! Full-breasted and broad-hipped fit to have children!
Full-brained and broad-browed, fit to teach them! My women should be the
embodiment of the nation, and none of them should work except for those
they loved and of their own free will."

"Sort of queen bees!" remarked Nellie. "Why have them work at all?"

"Why? Is it 'work' for a mother to nurse her little one, to wash it, to
dress it, to feed it, to watch it at night, to nurse it when it sickens,
to teach it as it grows? And if she does that does she not do all that we
have a right to ask of her? Need we ask her to earn her own living and
bear children as well? Shall we make her a toy and a slave, or harden her
to battle with men? I wouldn't. My women should be such that their
children would hold them sacred and esteem all women for their sakes. I
don't want the shrieking sisterhood, hard-voiced and ugly and unlovable,
perpetuated. And they will not be perpetuated. They can't make us marry
them. Their breed must die out."

"In other words," observed Nellie; "you would leave the present
relationship of woman to Society unchanged, except that you would serve
her out free rations."

"No! She should be absolutely mistress of her own body, and sole legal
guardian of her own children."

"Which means that you would institute free divorce, and make the family
matriarchal instead of patriarchal; replace one lopsided system by
another."

"Give it him, Nellie," put in Connie. "I haven't heard those notions of
his for years. I thought he had recanted long ago."

"Well, yes! But you nee