“Order, order,” cried he. “The wound, sir, and the incident are now closed. The subject before the house is Lovely Woman.”
He sat down.
The draper licked his lips sullenly, and proceeded.
“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....”