race.

But thousands and thousands of the love-maddened rose up and denounced
the Beauty Trust, demanded a return to the former conditions of fair
competition in the open shop of matrimony.

They were timidly encouraged by thousands of middle-aged gentlemen who
denied that either excessive meagreness or baldness was hereditary; they
even dared to assert that the suffragette revolution had been a mistake,
and pointed out that only an average of one in every hundred women had
taken the trouble to exercise her privilege at the polls in the recent
election, and that ninety per cent. of those who voted marked their
ballots wrong or forgot to mark them at all, or else invalidated them by
writing suggestions to the candidates on the backs of the ballots.

A week of terrible confusion ensued, and, in the very midst of it, news
came from London that Miss Pondora Bottomly, who, after throwing bricks
all day through the back windows of Windsor Castle, had been arrested by
a very thin Scotch policeman, had suddenly seized the policeman and
married him in spite of his terrified cries.

A shout of protest arose from every human man in the civilised world; a
groan of dismay burst from every human woman. It was the beginning of the
end; the old order of things was already in sight; men, long hidden,
reappeared in public places; wives shyly began to respond to the cautious
"good-mornings" of their long ignored husbands, the wealthy and socially
desirable but otherwise unattractive plucked up spirits; florists,
caterers, modistes, ministers came out of seclusion and began to prowl
around the debris of their ruined professions with a view to starting
out again in business; and here and there the forgotten art of flirting
was furtively resurrected and resumed in the awaking metropolis.

"Perfection," said America's greatest orator on the floor of the Senate,
"is endurable only because unattainable. The only things on earth that
make this world interesting are its sporting chances, its misfortunes,
and its mutts!"

And within a month after the delivery of this classic the American nation
had resumed its normal, haphazard aspect. The revolution, the riots on
Fifth Avenue and Long Acre, the bachelors' St. Bartholomew were all
forgotten; Tammany Hall and the Republican State Organization yawned,
stretched, rubbed their eyes, awoke, and sat up licking their hungry
chops; the gentlemen in charge of the Bureau of Special Privileges opened