"You can deny it," said Buzard.
"In the face of the facts," said Sir Roderick. "To begin with, they're several inches shorter, several pounds lighter; they've less physical strength in footpounds."
"More endurance," said Buzard.
"Less sensitiveness merely. All those are demonstrable things—amenable to figures and apparatus. Then they stand nervous tensions worse, the breaking-point comes sooner. They have weaker inhibitions, and inhibition is the test of a creature's position in the mental scale."
He maintained that in the face of Buzard's animated protest. Buzard glanced at their moral qualities. "More moral!" cried Dover, "more self-restraint! Not a bit of it! Their desires and passions are weaker even than their controls; that's all. Weaken restraints and they show their quality. A drunken woman is far worse than a drunken man. And as for their biological significance——"
"They are the species," said Buzard, "and we are the accidents."
"They are the stolon and we are the individualized branches. They are the stem and we are the fruits. Surely it's better to exist than just transmit existence. And that's a woman's business, though we've fooled and petted most of 'em into forgetting it...."
He proceeded to an attack on the intellectual quality of women. He scoffed at the woman artist, at feminine research, at what he called the joke of feminine philosophy. Buzard broke in with some sentences of reply. He alleged the lack of feminine opportunity, inferior education.
"You don't or won't understand me," said Dover. "It isn't a matter of education or opportunity, or simply that they're of inferior capacity; it lies deeper than that. They don't want to do these things. They're different."
"Precisely," ejaculated Buzard, as if he claimed a score.