Her speech is unanimously applauded; she is elected lady-president on the spot, by public acclamation, and the chorus of ladies march off towards the Pnyx to secure their places like the old gentlemen in 'The Wasps' ready for the daybreak. "In the next scene, two of the husbands enter in great perplexity, one wrapped in his wife's dressing gown, and the other with only his under-garment {246} on and without his shoes. They both want to go to the assembly but cannot find their clothes. While they are wondering what in the world their wives can have done with them, and what is become of the ladies themselves, a third neighbor, Chremes, comes in. He has been to the assembly; but even he was too late to get the threepence which was allowed out of the public treasury to all who took their seat in good time, and which all Athenian citizens, if we may trust their satirist, were so ludicrously eager to secure. The place was quite full already, and of strange faces, too. And a handsome fair-faced youth (Praxagora in disguise, we are to understand) had got up, and amid the loud cheers of those unknown voters had proposed and carried a resolution, that the government of the state should be placed in the hands of a committee of ladies,--an experiment which had found favor also with others, chiefly because it was 'the only change which had not as yet been tried at Athens.' His two neighbors are somewhat confounded at his news, but congratulate themselves on the fact that the wives will now, at all events, have to see to the maintenance of the children, and that 'the gods sometimes bring good out of evil.'