n't you want it, George?"

"I? Not at all."

"Then why on earth did you keep me imprisoned in that room so long if you
didn't want those papers?"

He said slowly: "Why didn't you give them up to me if _you_ didn't really
want them, Betty?"

She shook her pretty head. "I don't know. . . . But I'm afraid it was
only partly obstinacy."

"It was only partly that with me," he said.

They smiled.

"I just wanted to detain you, I suppose," he admitted.

"George, you wouldn't expect me to match that horrid confession--would
you?"

"No, I wouldn't ask it of you."

He laid his cheek against hers and whispered: "Darling, do you think our
great love justifies our concealing my myopia?"

"George," she murmured, "I think it does. . . . Besides, I'm dreadfully
near-sighted myself."

"You!"

"Dear, every one of us has got _something_ the matter with her. Miss
Vining, who caught the Mayor, wears a rat herself. . . . Do you mean to
say that men believe there ever was a perfect woman?"

He kissed her slowly. "_I_ believe it," he said.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XVIII

AS the extremes of fashionable feminine costume appear first on Fifth
Avenue in late November, and in early December are imitated in Harlem,
and finally in January pervade the metropolitan purlieus, so all the
great cities of the Union, writhing in the throes of a fashionable
suffragette revolution, presently inoculated the towns; and the towns
infected the villages, and the villages the hamlets, and the hamlets
passed the contagion along into the open country, where isolated farms
and dicky-birds alone remained uninfected and receptive.

It was even asserted by enthusiastic suffragettes that flocks of feminine
dicky-birds had begun to assault masculine birds of the same variety;
and that the American landscape was full of agitated male birds, lacking
rear plumage, flying distractedly in every direction or squatting
disconsolately in lonely trees, counting their tail feathers.

Mr. Borroughs and our late great President were excitedly inclined to
believe it, but the most famous and calm of explorers, who had recently
returned from exile to his camp on top of Mt. McKinley, warned the
scientific world on a type-writer not to credit anything that anybody
said until he had corroborated it in the magazines. And he left that week
for another trip to the pole to find out what the attitude of the
polecats might be concerning the matter in qu