it. We're in for knowledge; let's have it plain and straight. I should
begin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and indecency...."

"Grundy would have fits!" I injected.

"Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold douches--publicly--if the sight was
not too painful--three times a day.... But I don't think, mind you,
that I should let the sexes run about together. No. The fact behind the
sexes--is sex. It's no good humbugging. It trails about--even in the
best mixed company. Tugs at your ankle. The men get showing off and
quarrelling--and the women. Or they're bored. I suppose the ancestral
males have competed for the ancestral females ever since they were both
some sort of grubby little reptile. You aren't going to alter that in
a thousand years or so.... Never should you have a mixed company,
never--except with only one man or only one woman. How would that be?...

"Or duets only?...

"How to manage it? Some rule of etiquette, perhaps."... He became
portentously grave.

Then his long hand went out in weird gestures.

"I seem to see--I seem to see--a sort of City of Women, Ponderevo.
Yes.... A walled enclosure--good stone-mason's work--a city wall, high
as the walls of Rome, going about a garden. Dozens of square miles of
garden--trees--fountains--arbours--lakes. Lawns on which the women play,
avenues in which they gossip, boats.... Women like that sort of thing.
Any woman who's been to a good eventful girls' school lives on the
memory of it for the rest of her life. It's one of the pathetic things