arleying, only since you must not kill
him you are obliged to keep out of his way. The common cyclist has
already driven ladies off the roads by forcing the pace, the honeymoon
tandem returns with its feelings hurt at his jesting, and now he is
driving off all quiet men."

"All this," said I, "because they said something disrespectful about
your machine at the last inn... You don't, I see, approve of the
feminine bicycle?"

My uncle did his best to be calm and judicial.

"A woman in a hurry is one of the most painful sights in the world, for
exertion does not become a woman as it does a man. Let us avoid all
prejudice in this matter, George, and discuss it with open minds. She
has, in the first place, a considerable length of hair, and she does it
up into rich and beautiful shapes with things called hairpins and with
curling irons. Very few people have hair that curls naturally, George.
You are young, but you are married, and I see nothing improper in
telling you these things. Well, when a woman rides about, exerting
herself violently to keep a bicycle going, her hair gets damp and the
pleasing curls lose their curliness and become wet, straggling bands of
hair plastered over her venous forehead. And a tragic anxiety is
manifest, an expression painful for a man to meet. Also her hairpins
come out and fall on the road to wait for pneumatic tires, and her hair
is no longer rich and beautiful in form. Then she gets dirty, horribly
dirty, as though she had been used to sweep the roads with. And her
skirts have to be weirdly altered, even to the divided skirt, so that
when she rides she looks like a short, squat little man. She not only
loses her beauty but her dignity. Now, for my own part, I think a man
wants a woman to worship--it is a man's point of view, of course, but I
can't help my sex--and the worshipping of these zouaves is incredible.
She is nothing more than a shorter, fuller, and feebler man. Heaven
help her! For the woman on the tricycle there are ampler excuses as
well as ampler skirts, the exertion is not too violent for grace and
coolness, and the offensive bulging above one narrow wheel is avoided.
But women will never sacrifice so much for so little; worshipfulness,
beauty, repose, and comfort for a paltry two or three miles more an
hour of pace. They know too well the graces of delay. To do things
slowly, George, is part of the art of living. Our sex learns that when
its youthful fervo