How “we” shall live and love together, is the question for consultation. And there is statute and dogma and custom and convention and tradition to be done over. These have been handed down until they are many of them past all usefulness. Some of them are moth-eaten and quite outworn. None of them, please note this, gentlemen, none of them is of her selection. Just think of that. There’s not a code in the world that was formulated by a woman. The creeds that have come from Rome and Wittenberg and Westminster were not even submitted for woman’s inspection. And marriage was made for her by law courts and church councils to which she was not even asked. There was not so much as a by-your-leave to the lady, in the matter of her most intimate personal concern. Oh, isn’t this clearly where the reconstruction of civilisation shall commence? MAKING OVER MARRIAGE Only for the man in khaki to come home again it waits. Then with the new woman, together at last, they can build the new world aright. For never again shall we permit any such skewed and twisted and one-sided job as that of the past. “Dear,” she will say, “you did it as well as you could, probably, that old world. But the trouble was, that you did it alone.” And with a little whimsical smile, she’ll quote for him the old proverb that “two heads are better than one.” Then perhaps they will walk in the garden in the evening. And with her hand in his arm, she will speak as she never could speak before—as a free woman who has found her soul! There were things, I think, that God forgot when he talked to Moses and to St. Paul. But now he’s told them to her. Listen: “Marriage,” she will say, “marriage, dear, we must make over so that it shall be something very sweet and very sacred.” Oh, it wasn’t always that yesterday. There are women who know it wasn’t. When a man could say to the woman the law gave to him, “Come unto me to-night, or I shall not give you money with which to buy shoes for the children to-morrow.” Or he may have said, “the slippers for your pretty feet”—when marriage was that way, everything in it divine just died! It shall never be so again. Hear the new woman. “We shall have more love about marriage and less law,” she will say. “And we shall never let them lock us in. Love always laughed even yesterday at the clumsy locksmiths who thought they had bolted and barred the Doll’s House with ordinance and ritual. For how love cometh, we may not say, who are mute before so much as the mystery of the tint of the rose or the perfume of the lilies in June. Nor how love goeth, dare we define. Presumptuous mortals who have thought to hold back love with law and enactment, have made of marriage an empty form, echoing with the mockery of the happiness that fled.”