mad scramble across the pleasure-beds. They know not
moderation. Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of Posterity
will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to shun it.

The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the abstract, as men do.

But there are grounds for supposing that the example before them of a sex
exercising self-control in freedom, would induce women to pledge
themselves to a similar abnegation, until they gain some sense of touch
upon the impalpable duty to the generations coming after us thanks to the
voluntary example we set them.

The stupendous task, which had hitherto baffled Skepsey in the course of
conversational remonstrances with his wife;--that of getting the Idea of
Posterity into the understanding of its principal agent, might then be
mastered.

Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary movement: it manifestly
devolves upon them. Let them at once take to rigorous physical training.
Women under compulsion, as vessels: men in their magnanimity,
patriotically, voluntarily.

Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him; he guessed it; and it
plunged him into a conflict with her, that did not suffer him to escape
without ruefully feeling the feebleness of his vocabulary: and
consequently he made a reluctant appeal to figures, and it hung upon the
bolder exhibition of lists and tables as to whether he was beaten; and if
beaten, he was morally her captive; and this being the case, nothing
could be more repulsive to Skepsey; seeing that he, unable of his nature
passively or partially to undertake a line of conduct, beheld himself
wearing a detestable 'ribbon,' for sign of an oath quite needlessly sworn
(simply to satisfy the lady overcoming him with nimbler tongue), and
blocking the streets, marching in bands beneath banners, howling hymns.

Statistics, upon which his master and friends, after exchanging opinions
in argument, always fell back, frightened him. As long as they had no
opponents of their own kind, they swept the field, they were
intelligible, as the word 'principle' had become. But the appearance of
one body of Statistics invariably brought up another; and the strokes and
counterstrokes were like a play of quarter-staff on the sconce, to knock
all comprehension out of Skepsey. Otherwise he would not unwillingly have
inquired to-morrow into the Statistics of the controversy between the
waters of the wells and of the casks, prepared to walk over to