“Take the love of gossip. Listen to the talk of army men and navy men and club men.
“Take Vanity, and look at the nuts and the dudes and the macaronis.
“Take curiosity, and remember Coventry. Take love of dress—”
“And remember Mr. ——,” said she, laughing.
“Exactly. And let any one who would controvert me consider his friends and relations critically, and tell me, with his hand on his heart, are the males destitute of female attributes and the females of male?
“They are not. They are all human beings, and to class them philosophically under the two divisions, Woman and Man, is a profound error and a commonplace error.
“It has led men to look on women as mysterious beings with essential motive springs and essential mental clockwork quite different from that of men.
“It has led to frightful volumes of gas being generated in certain skulls, like the skull, for instance, of X——, and some of the leaders of the Feminist movement, and the escape of this gas is making an alarming noise.
“When Ellen Key, for instance, says that ‘Human souls can be divided into organic and inorganic,’ and that ‘Ibsen makes the masculine soul inorganic, definitive, finished, determined; the feminine soul, on the other hand, he more often makes organic, growing in evolution,’ what does she mean?
“All this loose talk about souls being organic and inorganic I would not exchange for one small concrete fact—such as that Mrs. Jones is a better man than her husband, or that John Smith ‘ought to have been born a girl,’ facts that help to prove that not only are men’s and women’s bodies and ‘souls’ made of the same stuff, but that the sex difference is so unfixed a quality that we find women who are to all intents and purposes men, and men women.