g me chloral. Some of the chief stateswomen on show, in fact,
were so downright hideous that I felt faint every time I had to look at
them.

The reform-monging suffragists seem to be equally devoid of the more
caressing gifts. They may be filled with altruistic passion, but they
certainly have bad complexions, and not many of them know how to dress
their hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the alleged
lubricity of the male-the single standard, medical certificates for
bridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The motive here, I believe,
is mere rage and jealousy. The woman who is not pursued sets up the
doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a
felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes
masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to
take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are bold
enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makes
her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed,
beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I know,
indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her right senses
has ever been actually seduced since the world began; whenever they bear
of a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet more, the normal woman
of lively charms, roving about among men, always tries to draw the
admiration of those who have previously admired elsewhere; she prefers
the professional to the amateur, and estimates her skill by the
attractiveness of the huntresses who have hitherto stalked it. The
iron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must get
one wholly without sentimental experience. If he has any, her crude
manoeuvres make him laugh and he is repelled by her lack of pulchritude
and amiability. All such suffragists (save a few miraculous beauties)
marry ninth-rate men when they marry at all. They have to put up with
the sort of castoffs who are almost ready to fall in love with lady
physicists, embryologists, and embalmers.

Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of these indignant
viragoes will come to naught. Men will keep on pursuing women until
hell freezes over, and women will keep luring them on. If the latter
enterprise were abandoned, in fact, the whole game of love would play
out, for not many men take any notice of women spontaneously. Nine men
out of ten would be quite happy, I believe, if ther