“It is. I wanted, if possible, to write something even more imbecile than has ever yet been written. I have not the patience for great length; nor the wit for brilliant satire; nor the imagination for the popular, spicy, impossible, ill-flavoured romance; so I have chosen the other line, adopted by the great majority, and aim at purposeless, pointless imbecility.” “And is Hal the model for your heroine?” asked Hermon. When Hal’s indignation and epithets had subsided, Quin remarked that he supposed the book fairly bristled with mothers, and with paragraphs of good advice to them. “Well, yes,” Dick admitted. “There are certainly a good many mothers—far more mothers than wives, in fact.” “Oh, naughty!” put in Lord Denton. “Not at all. It has to do with a theory. It is to bring out the common sense of vegetables compared to humans. Humans condemn millions of women, specially born for motherhood, to purposeless, joyless spinsterhood, all on account of a prejudice. No green, brainless, commonplace vegetable would be guilty of such unutterable folly as that.” “Don’t be too sweeping,” quoth Quin. “In the East End women are still mothers from choice; and given decent, healthy conditions, they would proudly raise an army to protect their country from her threatening foes. It is not their fault that 50 per cent of their offspring are sickly, anaemic little weeds.” “It sounds as if your book has a serious side in spite of its imbecility?” suggested Lorraine. “Imbecility and madness are usually full of seriousness,” Dick told her—“far more so than commonplace rationalism.” “And do you want to revolutionise society?” “Oh dear no; what an alarming idea!” “Then what do you want?”—they asked him. “I want to see all the superfluous unemployed spinsters busy, happy mothers, patriotically contributing to raise a splendid fighting-force, for one thing, which will certainly be regarded as an utterly imbecile idea by a magnificently rational world.” “And have you any theory about it?” asked Lord Denton. “Nothing but the worn-out, commonplace, absurdly natural theories of the vegetable and animal kingdoms. My only chance is that, being so ancient, and so absurdly natural, the modern world may mistake them for something entirely new, and seize upon them with the fasionable avidity for novelties.” “Or they may lock you up,” suggested Quin. “In any case I’m afraid you’ll be too late,” Hal commented, with a half grave, half sarcastic air; “for before your theories can make any headway, England is likely to have given all her life-blood to systems, and restrictions, and cut-and-dried conventions, utterly regardless of her need for a strong protecting force to maintain her existence at all. Taken in the aggregate, she never has bothered much about the primary necessity for the best possible conditions for the mothers of the future.” “What a learned sentence, Hal,” put in Lorraine, looking amused. “Quite worthy of a militant suffragette.”