“Gentlemen,” said he, and he thrust his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, raising a drowsy eyebrow--“woman was once content to _be_. Hiccup. To trip through the banquet of existence appealing to man as the Beautiful; and, being beautiful, to be loved--to sit on the knees of man and kiss him kisses. She is no longer content. Woman has become a danger--a menace--hiccup--a pronounced menace. Damn this hiccup! Woman, I say, has become a menace to the State. Woman is no longer content to be beautiful--she has come out into the noisy thoroughfare of life and demands liberty to win her own career, and to clean up that thoroughfare. I call it unwomanly. Yet the men, like the asses they are--hiccup--are marrying them. But, you know, I’m against blue-stockings----” “Order!” cried the Major--“the ladies’ underclothes are out of order.” The draper licked his lips and blinked: “I withdraw the stockings,” said he--“fancy, you and me, gentlemen, mating with a female who knows as much as we do--fancy the want of ’armony there must be in the house where the lady is our equal in intelligence and in the--all the other things that go to make up a man’s natural superiority--hiccup.... I’m against this Pallas Athene business myself--the woman putting on the blooming helmet and coming out and criticising conduct. It’s indelicate. It takes the bloom off the peach of her modesty. Not, mind you, that I’m one as plumps too solid for modesty. Not at all. I don’t go nap on modesty. For my part, I like a woman who can take her buss like a live thing--as women were meant by God’s design so to do. A woman who draws the line at honest kissing is no woman at all--and is of the nature of a public nuisance. A woman who is cold-blooded enough to write sonnets to her love when she might be sitting on his knees and loving her love is committing an offence against her Original Intention--which is a sin against nature. I ask you, then, gentlemen, to fill your glasses and drown Modesty....” CHAPTER XXV _Wherein the Major takes to his Bed_ The winter dawdled late in the city. Saint Valentine went out into the darkness of the night, with silent feet muffled in a heavy fall of snow. And Major Modeyne went with him. They brought him home in the early morning, dead and icy cold, and laid him upon his bed; and when they were gone Betty sat by the still figure and stroked the chill hand that had done intentional ill to none; in such strange manner she tasted for the first time the bitterness of death--in such sorry fashion the poor tattered remains of her childhood fell from her, sitting there, listening for the deep mystic significance of the eternal slaying that is a part of the eternal life.... Betty, as by pronounced habit, was to suffer for it.