"Professor," she cried, "all over the city desirable young men are being pursued and married by the thousands! We have swept the State, with Brooklyn and West Point yet to hear from!" Her glance fell upon the Governor; she laughed glee-fully. "Shall I call a taxi, Professor?" she asked. An exquisite and modest pride transformed the features of Professor Betty Challis to a beauty almost celestial. "Let George do it," she said tenderly. [Illustration] [Illustration] XVII A FEW minutes later, amid a hideous scene of riot, where young men were fleeing distractedly in every direction, where excited young girls were dragging them, struggling and screaming, into cabs, where even the police were rushing hither and thither in desperate search for a place to hide in, the Governor of New York and Professor Elizabeth Challis might have been seen whirling downtown in a taxicab toward the marriage license bureau. Her golden head lay close to his; his moustache rested against her delicately flushed cheek. A moment later she sat up straight in dire consternation. "Oh, those papers! The draft of the bill!" she exclaimed. "Where is it?" "Did you want it, Betty?" he asked, surprised. "Why--why, no. Didn't you want it, George?" "I? Not at all." "Then why on earth did you keep me imprisoned in that room so long if you didn't want those papers?" He said slowly: "Why didn't you give them up to me if _you_ didn't really want them, Betty?" She shook her pretty head. "I don't know. . . . But I'm afraid it was only partly obstinacy." "It was only partly that with me," he said. They smiled. "I just wanted to detain you, I suppose," he admitted. "George, you wouldn't expect me to match that horrid confession--would you?" "No, I wouldn't ask it of you." He laid his cheek against hers and whispered: "Darling, do you think our great love justifies our concealing my myopia?" "George," she murmured, "I think it does. . . . Besides, I'm dreadfully near-sighted myself." "You!" "Dear, every one of us has got _something_ the matter with her. Miss Vining, who caught the Mayor, wears a rat herself. . . . Do you mean to say that men believe there ever was a perfect woman?" He kissed her slowly. "_I_ believe it," he said. [Illustration] [Illustration] XVIII AS the extremes of fashionable feminine costume appear first on Fifth Avenue in late November, and in early December are imitated in Harlem, and finally in January pervade the metropolitan purlieus, so all the great cities of the Union, writhing in the throes of a fashionable suffragette revolution, presently inoculated the towns; and the towns infected the villages, and the villages the hamlets, and the hamlets passed the contagion along into the open country, where isolated farms and dicky-birds alone remained uninfected and receptive.