“No nation can become better that the quality of its womanhood, of its motherhood. No nation without an ideal, a standard of nobility, can endure. We have come upon the days, these devastating days of war, when each nation is put to the test. Each nation must now exhibit its quality or die. This quality, in the last analysis, is capacity for sacrifice. It is endurance, and self-abnegation in the interest of all. It is surrender--the surrender to principle, order, duty, without which there can be no victory. The woman, like the man, who will not live for her country may yet be forced to die for her country. “The educated young woman of to-day, the bachelor girl, the 'modern' girl, will speak loudly of her right to vote, her right to express herself,--that is her great phrase, 'self-expression'!--her intellectual superiority to marriage and motherhood. She will insist on what she calls freedom. For that she will even become militant. These phrases, and the not very pleasant life they cover, mean sterility, they mean anarchism, they mean disorganization, and perhaps death. They are the doctrine of the truffler, the woman who turns from duty to a passionate pursuit of enjoyment. They are eating, those phrases, like foul bacteria, at the once sound heart of our national life. “So you see, in presenting this little picture of a girl who thought freedom--for herself--was everything, and of the havoc she wrought in one perhaps representative home, I have not been trying to entertain you. I have been preaching at you. If, inadvertently, I have entertained you as well, so much the better. For then my little sermon will have a wider audience.” And, deliberately, he walked off stage. On the stairs, moving slowly down from the gallery, Sue and the Worm looked at each other. “I'm rather bewildered,” said she. “Yes. Nobody knew the play was about all that. But they believe him. Hear them yelling in there. He has put it over. Pete is a serious artist now. He admits it.” “There was rather a personal animus in the speech. Didn't you think so?” “Oh, yes. He was talking straight at you. Back last spring I gathered that he was writing the play at you--his original version of it.” From one landing to another Sue was silent. Then she said: “I never knew such a contradictory man. Why, he wrote the Nature film. And that is all for freedom.” The Worm smiled. “Pete never had an idea in his life. He soaks up atmospheres and then, because he _is_ a playwright and a dam' good one, he turns them into plays. He sees nothing but effects. Pete can't _think!_ And then, of course, he sees the main chance. He never misses that. Why, that speech was pure genius. Gives 'em a chance to believe that the stuff they love because it's amusing and makes 'em blubber is really serious and important. Once you can make 'em believe that, you're made. Pete is made, right now. He's a whale of a success. He's going to be rich.” “But, Henry, they'll see through him.”