de about over the superficialities of things. We are
spoiling the whole process of progress, we are turning all the
achievements of mankind to nothingness. Men invent, create, do miracles
with the world, and we translate it all into shopping, into a glitter of
dresses and households, into an immense parade of pride and excitement.
We excite men, we stir them to get us and keep us. Men turn from their
ideas of brotherhood to elaborate our separate cages....

"I am Justin's wife; not a thing in my heavens or my earth that is not
subordinated to that.

"Something has to be done for women, Stephen, something--urgently--and
nothing is done until that is done, some release from their intolerable
subjection to sex, so that for us everything else in life, respect,
freedom, social standing, is entirely secondary to that. But what has to
be done? We women do not know. Our efforts to know are among the most
desolating of spectacles. I read the papers of those suffrage women; the
effect is more like agitated geese upon a common than anything human has
a right to be.... That's why I turn to you. Years ago I felt, and now I
know, there is about you a simplicity of mind, a foolishness of faith,
that is stronger and greater than the cleverness of any woman alive. You
are one of those strange men who take high and sweeping views--as larks
soar. It isn't that you yourself are high and sweeping.... No, but still
I turn to you. In the old days I used to turn to you and shake your mind
and make you think about things you seemed too sluggish to think about
without my clamor. Once do you remember at Martens I shook you by the
ears.... And when I made you think, you thought, as I could never do.
Think now--about women.

"Stephen, there are moments when it seems to me that this futility of
women, this futility of men's effort _through_ women, is a fated
futility in the very nature of things. We may be saddled with it as we
are with all the animal infirmities we have, with appendixes and
suchlike things inside of us, and the passions and rages of apes and a
tail--I believe we have a tail curled away somewhere, haven't we?
Perhaps mankind is so constituted that badly as they get along now they
couldn't get along at all if they let women go free and have their own
way with life. Perhaps you can't have _two_ sexes loose together. You
must shut up one. I've a horrible suspicion that all these anti-suffrage
men like Lord Cromer and Sir Ray Lankeste