"Cato, you ought to be writing tracts for the Ethical Culture Society instead of newspaper articles for Hutchins’ wicked _Evening Chronicle_. What are you doing among the Outlaws instead of in a goody-goody Sunday School?" He took her raillery in good part. "Every journalist is a patcher-up of unconsidered trifles," he said. "He makes a crazy quilt of them as orderly and coherent as he can. Well, where can I get the raw material I need in greater supply than in this little community of criminality and sentimentality, of Radicalism and bad debts? Kips Bay is an inexhaustible mine of police news and town talk." "Well, I can’t say that your kind stay among us has broadened you out much, Rob!" "No?" he replied, amused at the shot. "I suppose I do grow more squeamish every day. Nothing like a steady diet of police episodes for purifying purposes. It acts the way some nauseous drugs do." "You’re perfectly detestable," she cried. She didn’t like anybody but herself to disparage Kips Bay. "You’ve put your mind in a prison, Rob. Your symptoms require a drastic remedy. If I were a physician of the soul, I should prescribe marriage." "Don’t be a Job’s comforter, Cornelia. I said I wanted female society, not female satiety. And, by the way, since when did you begin to advocate marriage as the door to freedom? You have always denounced it as the trapdoor to slavery." "I don’t advocate it for women, and even for men I recommend it only in the most desperate cases." "Well, mine isn’t desperate. But Hutchins Burley’s is, judging from his conduct at the ball tonight. You might prescribe for him." "Oh, he’s past all treatment. What do you think he told me in strict confidence yesterday? That he’s weighed down by a great sorrow; too many women find him irresistible, and persecute him to death with their lovesick attentions." "I call that a new form of persecutional mania." "He was in dead earnest, Rob. He called himself a martyr to love, fancy that!" "Well, he seemed to be a remarkably willing martyr tonight. He buzzed like a huge wasp from one pair of lips to another. When he got to Mazie, who unfolds her petals so alluringly, he became quite intoxicated." "Which means that Mazie acted in a perfectly shameless way, as usual." "Whose mind is a prison now?" "I don’t know what you mean," said Cornelia acridly. "Please don’t assume that, because I no longer believe in marriage, I’ve turned my back on decency and good manners." "This is breaking a butterfly on a wheel, Cornelia. The fact is, Mazie doesn’t have to _act_ to produce the peculiar behavior in men which I described. You know that quite well. She is what Joseph Conrad calls ’one of the women of all time.’ I’d call her a throw-back with the emotions and appetites of a cave woman and the thoughts and looks of a Ziegfield chorus girl. It’s not by acting shamelessly, or by acting at all, but by just passively being herself that she sets a man’s blood boiling."