Having established this fact they roguishly introduce into her boudoir an estimable young man and permit him to caress her dramatically. But the whole proceeding is stainless. It is drolly suggestive of unspeakable things—see box office receipts. But suggestiveness is necessary to bring home to people the blindness of virtue and the dangers that beset the underpaid young women who ignorantly make it its own reward—(if that means anything). Anyway, when the audience leaves it has been enlightened. Its taste has not been offended. Virtue has been shown to be a dangerous thing—that is, uneducated virtue has. Everyone agrees. And if not they disagree. In either case the discussion properly conducted (under the auspices of the “Amalgamated Virgins of the 21st and 22nd Wards”) is pleasing and improving. The press argues delicately and in good taste about sex hygiene. A new physiology is placed in the public schools containing information on the most effective way of brushing the teeth of the young and preserving the hair of the old. And last week Coroner Hoffman told me that it was impossible to estimate how many girls were killed annually in Chicago by abortive operations. He put the number in the hundreds. Hooray! Death is the wages of sin. But all quibbling aside, what does this low fellow Wedekind whom I started out by calling an idealist (I will prove it shortly) do? To begin with, he talks about sex. Not about stockings and undergarments and perfumed kisses, ankles, asterisks and anomalies. Everyone knows that this kind of talk, particularly when produced in drama form, is in the first place inexcusable, and in the second place unnecessary, and in the third place vulgar. And in the fourth place, instead of making the best of a bad job—that is, making his contributions a mental stimulus for snickering roués and ladies sensitive of their status—he insists upon being nasty without being covert. Is there anything more unpardonable? Nobody can enjoy nastiness. The argument is an endless one. It leads to nothing except blows or blushes. As for the plays—I almost forgot I was reviewing them—Wedekind explodes volcanically on the subject he treats, and blows the question mark out of woman. He takes all the crimes a policeman ever heard of, rolls them up in a package of soft warm flesh and labels it “Woman.” He cracks his showman’s whip and calls attention to the texture of her skin and the white meat of her body. And then he sends her forth to ruin, to sweep like a polluted and wreck-strewn wave through life, breaking at last in a dirty crest on a foreign shore and leaving a scum behind her. Are these the worst things Wedekind could find to label woman—incest, butchery, lecherous animalism, bloody business and abandonment? Who but a sick idealist would pick a careless and care-free prostitute as a flaming example of woman at her worst? And is the power to destroy the most terrible power woman possesses?