Mobs of maddened spinsters paraded the streets of the five boroughs demanding spouses. Maidens of uncertain age and attractions who, in the hysterical enthusiasm of the eugenic revolution, had offered themselves the pleasures of martyrdom by vowing celibacy and by standing aside while physically perfect sister suffragettes pounced upon and married all flawless specimens of the opposite sex, now began to demand for themselves the leavings among the mature, thin-shanked, and bald-headed. In vain their beautiful comrades attempted to explain the eugenistic principles--to point out that the very essence of the entire cult lay in non-reproduction by the physically unfit, and in the ultimate extinction of the thin, bald, and meagre among the human race. But thousands and thousands of the love-maddened rose up and denounced the Beauty Trust, demanded a return to the former conditions of fair competition in the open shop of matrimony. They were timidly encouraged by thousands of middle-aged gentlemen who denied that either excessive meagreness or baldness was hereditary; they even dared to assert that the suffragette revolution had been a mistake, and pointed out that only an average of one in every hundred women had taken the trouble to exercise her privilege at the polls in the recent election, and that ninety per cent. of those who voted marked their ballots wrong or forgot to mark them at all, or else invalidated them by writing suggestions to the candidates on the backs of the ballots. A week of terrible confusion ensued, and, in the very midst of it, news came from London that Miss Pondora Bottomly, who, after throwing bricks all day through the back windows of Windsor Castle, had been arrested by a very thin Scotch policeman, had suddenly seized the policeman and married him in spite of his terrified cries. A shout of protest arose from every human man in the civilised world; a groan of dismay burst from every human woman. It was the beginning of the end; the old order of things was already in sight; men, long hidden, reappeared in public places; wives shyly began to respond to the cautious "good-mornings" of their long ignored husbands, the wealthy and socially desirable but otherwise unattractive plucked up spirits; florists, caterers, modistes, ministers came out of seclusion and began to prowl around the debris of their ruined professions with a view to starting out again in business; and here and there the forgotten art of flirting was furtively resurrected and resumed in the awaking metropolis. "Perfection," said America's greatest orator on the floor of the Senate, "is endurable only because unattainable. The only things on earth that make this world interesting are its sporting chances, its misfortunes, and its mutts!"