e point I'm trying to make is not that. It's
this: we can't afford to lose them. This place is a prison now. It will
be worse than that if this keeps up--it'll be a madhouse."

"Do you mean to tell me that you're advocating marriage by capture?"
Billy asked in an incredulous voice.

"I mean to tell you I'm arguing capture," Ralph said with emphasis.
"After that, you, can trust the marriage question to take care of
itself."

Argument broke out hydra-headed. They wrangled the whole evening. Theory
at first guided them. In the beginning, names like Plato, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer preceded quotation; then, came Shaw, Havelock-Ellis,
Kraft-Ebing, Weininger. Sleep deadened their discussion temporarily
but it burst out at intervals all the next day. In fact, it seemed to
possess eternal vitality, eternal fascination. Leaving theory, they went
for parallels of their strange situation, to history, to the Scriptures,
to fiction, to drama, to poetry.

Honey ended every discussion with a philosophic, "Aside from the
question of brutality, this marriage by capture isn't a sporting
proposition. It's like jacking deer. I'm not for it. And, O Lord, what's
the use of chewing the rag so much about it? Wait a while. We'll get
them yet, I betchu!"

All of Honey's sex-pride flared in this buoyant assurance. It had
apparently not yet occurred to him that he would not conquer Lulu in the
end and conquer her by merely submitting to her wooing of him.

And in the meantime, the voiceless tete-a-teteing of the five couples
continued.

"Say, Ralph," Honey said one day in a calm interval, "it's just occurred
to me that we haven't seen those girls, flying in a bunch for quite some
time. Don't suppose they've quarrelled, do you?"

Everybody stopped work to stare at him. "I bet that's the answer,"
Ralph exclaimed. His voice held the note of one for whom a private
mystification has at last broken.

"But what do you suppose they've quarrelled about?" Pete Murphy asked.

"Me," Honey said promptly.

Ralph laughed absent-mindedly. "It's a hundred to one shot that they're
quarrelling about us, though," he said. For some mysterious reason this
theory raised his spirits perceptibly.

"But--to get down to brass tacks," Pete asked in a puzzled tone, "what
have we done to make them quarrel?"

"Oh, we've done nothing," Ralph answered with one of his lordly
assumptions of a special knowledge. "It's just the disorganization
that always falls on wome