is not the home, her home is the sphere."

With these feeble aphorisms he sat down. He had at least convinced the
company on one point--namely, that discussions are always a futile
anti-climax.

But Davenant was up, and he was amusing, though he always said the same
thing. "I protest," he said, "against industrialism being carried any
further. It has marred our men, let us keep it from our women. I want
to see a world full of guilds and craftsmen and artificers, not working
eight hours a day and then going to a municipal park to drink municipal
cocoa and hear the municipal band, but working because they love their
work, because it is their creation, their life. And I want to see
women working as they love to work, not sordidly and cheaply in a
market of labour. The women I want will not work against men, but with
them and for them, fashioning beautiful homes and beautiful things of
every kind. And you will find that it is no use to put woman on a
level with men because women are not crudely rational like men, who
analyse and destroy. With woman lies the future, because she alone can
create without destroying. Man is destructive and analytic. Woman is
ultimate, intuitive, basic, and synthetic."

The less experienced members of the Essay Society began to wonder
whether this could mean anything and roused themselves from sleep. But
those who knew Davenant understood. He had an affection for certain
words and loved to entwine them with any subject that came to hand.
Woman was not the only entity which Davenant had been known to call
"ultimate, intuitive, basic, and synthetic."

Then a remote, unknown young man in spectacles and spats said in a
plaintive way that the reader of the paper did not understand about
Laav: that Laav made all things different: that religion was morality
tinged with emotion: that the home was just what its inhabitants made
of it: that a change of heart was needed: that you couldn't make men
good by Act of Parliament; that, just as dancing was the poetry of
motion, so Laav was the poetry of life.

Then this master of the catch-word sat down amid a deathly silence. It
appeared afterwards that he had got in by mistake: he thought he was
attending a meeting of Oxford Churchmen on Home Missions. Lawrence
rose. He began, suitably, by treading on some coffee-cups and bananas,
stumbling backward and tripping over the cord which united the
reading-lamp and the wall. The lamp fell with a