ienced as this. At all
events I do not propose to give the Kansas councillors the benefit of
the doubt. I therefore advise the public at large, which will finally
decide the matter, to keep a vigilant eye on gentlemen who will stand
anything at the theatre except a performance of Mrs Warren's Profession,
and who assert in the same breath that [a] the play is too loathsome to
be bearable by civilized people, and [b] that unless its performance
is prohibited the whole town will throng to see it. They may be merely
excited and foolish; but I am bound to warn the public that it is
equally likely that they may be collected and knavish.

At all events, to prohibit the play is to protect the evil which the
play exposes; and in view of that fact, I see no reason for assuming
that the prohibitionists are disinterested moralists, and that
the author, the managers, and the performers, who depend for
their livelihood on their personal reputations and not on rents,
advertisements, or dividends, are grossly inferior to them in moral
sense and public responsibility.

It is true that in Mrs Warren's Profession, Society, and not any
individual, is the villain of the piece; but it does not follow that
the people who take offence at it are all champions of society. Their
credentials cannot be too carefully examined.

HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND

It is eight o'clock in the evening. The curtains are drawn and the lamps
lighted in the drawing room of Her flat in Cromwell Road. Her lover, a
beautiful youth of eighteen, in evening dress and cape, with a bunch of
flowers and an opera hat in his hands, comes in alone. The door is near
the corner; and as he appears in the doorway, he has the fireplace on
the nearest wall to his right, and the grand piano along the opposite
wall to his left. Near the fireplace a small ornamental table has on it
a hand mirror, a fan, a pair of long white gloves, and a little white
woollen cloud to wrap a woman's head in. On the other side of the room,
near the piano, is a broad, square, softly up-holstered stool. The room
is furnished in the most approved South Kensington fashion: that is, it
is as like a show room as possible, and is intended to demonstrate the
racial position and spending powers of its owners, and not in the least
to make them comfortable.

He is, be it repeated, a very beautiful youth, moving as in a dream,
walking as on air. He puts his flowers down carefully on the table
beside the