lp
him, except with young girls. He may win the body; but he cannot win the
soul. Can it be true then that most women would like two husbands, one
Red-blood, the other Mollycoddle, one to be the father of their
children, the other to be the companion of their souls? Women alone can
answer; and, for the first time in history, they are beginning to be
articulate.

IX

ADVERTISEMENT

The last two days and nights I spent in a railway train. We passed
through some beautiful country; that, I believe, is the fact; but my
feeling is that I have emerged from a nightmare. In my mind is a jumbled
vision of huge wooden cows cut out in profile and offering from dry
udders a fibrous milk; of tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastly
realism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I needed
them--U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in an
interminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals of
indigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous
frieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco
than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a black
moustache, recurring, like a decimal, _ad infinitum_ on the top of a
board, to inform me that his beauty is the product of his own toilet
powder; of cod-fish without bones--"the kind you have always bought"; of
bacon packed in glass jars; of whiz suspenders, sen-sen throat-ease,
sure-fit hose, and the whole army of patent medicines. By river, wood,
and meadow, hamlet or city, mountain or plain, hovers and flits this
obscene host; never to be escaped from, never to be forgotten, fixing,
with inexorable determination, a fancy that might be tempted to roam to
that one fundamental fact of life, the operation of the bowels.

Nor, of course, are these incubi, these ghostly emanations of the One
God Trade, confined to the American continent. They haunt with equal
pertinacity the lovelier landscapes of England; they line the route to
Venice; they squat on the Alps and float on the Rhine; they are
beginning to occupy the very air, and with the advent of the air-ship,
will obliterate the moon and the stars, and scatter over every lonely
moor and solitary mountain peak memorials of the stomach, of the liver
and the lungs. Never, in effect, says modern business to the soul of
man, never and nowhere shall you forget that you are nothing but a body;
that you require to eat, to salivate, to digest, to evacuate