“‘To be fashionable is better than to be a Puritan mother,’ Eve retorted. A woman can find comfort in a new garter or a picture hat even when a scandal is hanging over her backbone.” “Then the episode of Eden—” “Eve’s appetite for apples, which gave the world dyspepsia and all the ills to which flesh is heir, has been thrown up in her face ever since the world began. Come to think of it, though, Darwin says there never was any beginning.” “Darwin has had his day,” I observed. “His teaching is now obsolete. Some day I’m going to write a book—everybody does these days—and I have already copyrighted the title, so literary pirates may beware. It is to be called ‘The Ascent of Man.’ No more is man the old Adam, the Eden of his perfect behind him forbidding its gardens of delight. In his present imperfect is the creative hauntings of the perfect he is yet to be. As in the old days the man said, ‘The woman’—so it is the woman who has given man the new birth. Creation always did centre about a petticoat, fables and creeds to the contrary notwithstanding.” “I asked Mother Eve about her childhood the other day, and she seemed lamentably ignorant of her younger days.” “If Adam hadn’t gone to sleep there would have been no women in the world,” I put in. Having a reputation as a confirmed misogynist, I felt that I must live up to it whenever occasion offered. “The queer part of it,” mused Cain, “is that he never woke up when the surgical operation was being performed and that, too, in the days when anæsthetics kept themselves hid in unpressed poppy pods. Catch a woman letting anybody take a rib from her without her knowing it!” “If woman is so wide-awake, how was it that Eve lost her certificate of character by getting drunk on apple cider?” “With the permission of Darwin and the rest, I will give you a revised version of the creation by the first higher critic—Cain, son of Adam and Eve: “In the beginning chaos created Cosmos. “And Cosmos continued to apply cosmetics to the face of the Globe and—Darwin was too busy to take notice. “And it came to pass that without Darwin to hold the universe in check, revolution arose; from revolution came evolution and evolution evolved into molecules which came into contact with protoplasm and by natural selection the latter survived and became a plastic cell which in turn threw a fit and degenerated into the primordial germ, which is the germ of truth. This selection was so unnatural that it did not survive protogene and to swallow this up there came an ocean of eocene. “And it came to pass that in the aeon of eocene there was enwombed in the chaotic chasm, later called Siam, a Simiad who was to show his relationship to the octopus by embracing the earth. And this Simiad grew according to his own fancy and—Darwin still slumbered.