‘Oh, Sacred Learning!’ she cried, ‘we have sinned against thee! We poor women in our conceit think that everything may be learned from books: we worship the Ideal Woman, and we are content with the rags of learning which remain from the work of Man. Yes, we are contented with these scraps. We will accept nothing that is not absolutely certain. Therefore we blasphemously and ignorantly say that the last word has been said upon everything, and that no more remains to be learned.’
‘Mankind is surrounded,’ the Professor went on as if talking to herself, ‘by a high wall of black ignorance and mystery. The wall is for ever receding or closing in upon us. The men of the past pushed it back more and more, and widened continually the boundaries of thought, so that the foremost among them were godlike for knowledge and for a love of knowledge. We women of the present are continually contracting the wall, so that soon we shall know nothing, unless—unless you come to our help.’
‘How can I help to restore knowledge,’ asked the young man, ‘being myself so ignorant?’
‘By giving back the university to the sex which can enlarge our bounds.’
Always the same thing—always coming back to the one subject.
There was a university sermon in the afternoon, being the feast of St Cecilia; they looked in, but the church was empty. In vacation time one hardly expects more than two or three resident lecturers with their husbands and boys, and a sprinkling of young men from the town. The sermon was dull—perhaps Lord Chester’s mind was out of sympathy with the subject; it treated on the old well-worn lines of Woman as the Musician.
‘I will show you at Cambridge,’ said the Professor when they came out, ‘some of the music of the past. What are the feeble strains, the oft-repeated phrases of modern music, compared with the grand old music conceived and written by men? Women have never composed great music.’
They left Oxford the next day and proceeded north.
‘I think,’ said the Professor as they were driving smoothly along the road, ‘that they did wrong in not trying to maintain the old railways. True there were many accidents, and sometimes great loss of life; yet it must have been a convenience to get from London to Liverpool in five hours. To be sure the art of making engines is dead: such arts could not survive when their new system of separate labour was introduced.’
They passed the old tracks of the railways from time to time, now long canals grass-grown, and now high embankments covered with trees and bushes. There were black holes, too, in the hill-sides through which the iron road had once run.