estion.

Meanwhile the cities were full of trouble and forcibly selected
bridegrooms. From 60,000 marriages recorded in New York City for the
twelve months of the previous year, in the few months of the eugenic
revolution the number of weddings had reached the enormous figures of
180,000, not including Flatbush.

Thousands and thousands of marriageable young men were hiding in their
clubs or in the shrubbery of Central Park, waiting for a chance to make
their escape to the country and remain incognito in hay lofts until the
eugenic revolution had ended itself in a dazzling display of divorce.

Westchester, the Catskills, and even the country farther north were full
of young business men and professional men fleeing headlong from their
jobs in Wall Street, Broadway, and Fifth Avenue, and hiring out to
farmers and boarding house keepers under assumed names. One could jump a
young man out of almost any likely thicket north of the Bronx; they were
as plentiful and as shy as deer in the Catskills; corn field, scrub,
marsh, and almost any patch of woods in the State, if carefully beaten
up, would have yielded at least one or two flocks of skulking young men.

Now, as there was no close season, and marriageable youths in New York
City became scarcer, those militant suffragettes devoted to eugenic
principles began to make excursions into the suburbs in search of bevies
and singles--which had escaped the exciting days of the great Long Acre
drive and the bachelors' St. Bartholomew. And, as the April days turned
into May days, and the May days into June days, parties of pretty,
laughing, athletic girls penetrated farther and farther into the country,
joyously rummaging the woods and routing out and scattering into flight
the lurking denizens. For every den had its denizen, and Diana roamed the
earth once more.

There was excellent sport to be had along the Hudson. Some young ladies
went in automobiles; some in yachts; some by train, to points north,
where the landscape looked more promising and wilder--but probably not as
wild as the startled masculine countenances peering furtively from
hillside thickets as some gay camping party of distractingly pretty girls
appeared, carrying as excess baggage one clergywoman and a bundle of
marriage licenses, with the bridegroom's name represented only by a
question mark.

It was on an unusually beautiful day in early June that two briar-mangled
and weather-beaten young men, bearing eve