"There's no use in discussing that," said the Governor blandly; "but I'd like to know what you suffragettes find so distasteful in that proposed bill which the Mayor and—and the Governor of New York have had drafted."
"It is reactionary—a miserable subterfuge—a treacherous attempt to return to the old order of things! A conspiracy to re-shackle, re-enslave American womanhood with the sordid chains of domestic cares! To drive her back into the kitchen, the laundry, the nursery—back into the dark ages of dependence and acquiescence and non-resistance—back into the degraded epochs of sentimental relations with the tyrant man!"
She leaned forward in her excitement and her sable boa slid back as she made a gesture with her expensive muff.
"Once," she said, "woman was so ignorant that she married for love! Now the national revolt has come. Neither sentiment nor impulse nor emotion shall ever again play any part in our relations with man!"
He said, trying to speak ironically: "That's a gay outlook, isn't it?"
"The outlook, Captain Jones, is straight into a glorious millennium. Marriage, in the future, is to mean the regeneration of the human race through cold-blooded selection in mating. Only the physically and mentally perfect will hereafter be selected as specimens for scientific propagation. All others must remain unmated—pro bono publico—and so ultimately human imperfection shall utterly disappear from this world!"
Her pretty enthusiasm, her earnestness, the delicious colour in her cheeks, began to fascinate him. Then uneasiness returned.
"Do you know," he said cautiously, "that the Governor of New York has received anonymous letters informing him that Professor Elizabeth Challis considers him a proper specimen for the—the t-t-terrible purposes of s-s-scientific p-p-propagation?"
"Some traitor in our camp," she said, "wrote those letters."
