your future husband has no right to know?"

"None whatever. He has the least right of all, and he'd better not try
to find out."

"You women are changing things!"

"We have to, if we're going to live among men. When you're in
Rome--"

"You're going to turn the world upside down, I suppose?"

"We've always done that more or less, and nobody ever could stop us,
from the Garden of Eden on. In the future, one thing is sure: a lot of
women will go wrong, as the saying is, under the new conditions, with
liberty and their own money and all. But, good Lord! millions of women
went wrong in the old days! The first books of the Bible tell about
all the kinds of wickedness that we know to-day. Somebody complained
that with all our modern science we hadn't invented one new deadly
sin. We go on using the same old seven--well, indecencies. It will be
the same with women. It's bound to be. You can't keep women unfree.
You've simply got to let them loose. The old ways were hideous; and
it's dishonest and vicious to pretend that people used to be better
than they were, just as an argument in favor of slavery, for fear they
will be worse than the imaginary woman they put up for an argument. I
fancy women were just about as good and just about as bad in old
Turkey, in the jails they call harems, as they are in a three-ringed
circus to-day.

"When the old-fashioned woman went wrong she lied or cried or
committed suicide or took to the streets or went on with her social
success, as the case might be. She'll go on doing much the same--just
as men do. Some men repent, some cheat, some kill themselves; others
go right along about their business, whether it's in a bank, a church,
a factory, a city or a village or anywhere.

"But in the new marriage--for marriage is really changing, though the
marrying people are the same old folks--in the new marriage a man must
do what a woman has had to do all along: take the partner for better
or worse and no questions asked."

He humored her heresy because he found it too insane to reason with.
"In other words, we'll take our women as is."

"That's the expression--_as is_. A man will take his sweetheart 'as
is' or leave her. And whichever he does, as you always say, oh, she'll
get along somehow."

"The old-fashioned home goes overboard, then?"

"That depends on what you mean by the old-fashioned home. I had one,
and it could well be spared. There were all kinds of homes in old
times and the M