r must know a lot about life
that I do not know. And that other man Sir Something-or-other Wright,
who said plainly that men cannot work side by side with women because
they get excited.... And yet, you know, women have had glimpses of a
freedom that was not mischievous. I could have been happy as a Lady
Abbess--I must have space and dignity, Stephen--and those women had
things in their hands as no women have things in their hands to-day.
They came to the House of Lords. But they lost all that. Was there some
sort of natural selection?...

"Stephen, you were made to answer my mind, and if you cannot do it
nobody can. What is your outlook for women? Are we to go back to
seclusion or will it be possible to minimize sex? If you are going to
minimize sex how are you going to do it? Suppression? There is plenty of
suppression now. Increase or diminish the pains and penalties? My
nephew, Philip's boy, Philip Christian, was explaining to me the other
day that if you boil water in an open bowl it just boils away, and that
if you boil it in a corked bottle it bangs everything to pieces, and
you have, he says, 'to look out.' But I feel that's a bad image.
Boiling-water isn't frantically jealous, and men and women are. But
still suppose, suppose you trained people not to make such an awful fuss
about things. _Now_ you train them to make as much fuss as possible....

"Oh bother it all, Stephen! Where's your mind in these matters? Why
haven't you tackled these things? Why do you leave it to _me_ to dig
these questions into you--like opening a reluctant oyster? Aren't they
patent? You up and answer them, Stephen--or this correspondence will
become abusive...."

Sec. 5

It was true that I did ignore or minimize sexual questions as much as I
could. I was forced now to think why I did this. That carried me back to
those old days of passion, memories I had never stirred for many years.
And I wrote to Mary that there was indeed no reason but a reasonable
fear, that in fact I had dismissed them because they had been beyond my
patience and self-control, because I could not think very much about
them without an egotistical reversion to the bitterness of my own case.
And in avoiding them I was only doing what the great bulk of men in
business and men in affairs find themselves obliged to do. They train
themselves not to think of the rights and wrongs of sexual life, not to
tolerate liberties even in their private imaginations. They know