"(A salvationist: 'Let us pray!'--A soldier: 'Hope, m'um, that Saturdays will be off-days?'--Solicitors, teetotallers, and three editors of Zola's collected works: 'Disgraceful! shocking!'--A scholar: 'Madame, that's a chestnut, Aristophanes has long proposed that!'--General uproar--a band of nuns from Piccadilly hurrah the proposal and raise prices of tickets--Scotland Yard smiles--the _Daily Nail_ kodaks everybody and interviews Mrs Pancake on the spot--Mrs Guard, the famous writer, at once founds a counter-League, with the motto 'Astronomy for the people--Stars and Stripes free--the United Gates of Love'--the _Daily Crony_ has an attack of moral appendicitis.) * * * * * "I wish," continued Alcibiades, amidst the laughter of the immortals, "Aristophanes had been present. I assure you that all that he said in his comedies called _Ecclesiazusae_ and _Lysistrata_ pale beside the tumultuous scenes caused by the peroration of Mrs Pancake. Her threat was in such drastic contrast to the stars and moon she personally could exhibit to the desires of men, that the comic effect of it became at times almost unbearable. "While the pandemonium was at its height a stentorian voice invited all present to another platform where another woman was holding forth on Free Love and Free Marriage. I forthwith repaired to the place, and heard what was in every way a most interesting speech delivered by a woman who consisted of a ton of bones and an ounce of flesh. She was between forty and seventy-nine. She talked in a tone of conviction which seemed to come from every corner of her personal masonry. Her gestures were, if I may say so, as strident as her voice, which came out with a peculiar gust of pectoral wind, unimpeded, as it was, by the fence of too numerous teeth. She said: "'Gentlemen, all that you have heard over there from the platforms of the suffragettes is, to put it mildly, the merest rubbish. We women do not want the suffrage. What we want is quite another thing. All our misery since the days of Eve comes from one silly, absurd, and criminal institution, and from that alone. Abolish that cesspool of depravity; that hotbed of social gangrene; that degradation of men and women; and we shall be all happy and contented for ever. "'That institution; that cancerous hotbed; that degradation is: _Marriage_. As long as we shall endure this scandalous bondage and prostitution of the most sacred sentiments and desires of human beings, even so long will our social wretchedness last. "'Abolish marriage. "'It has neither sense, nor object, nor right; it is the most hapless aberration of humanity. How can you uphold such a monstrous thing?