what harm
could it do? With me Nicolete was, indeed, safe,--that, of course, I
knew,--and safely she should come back home again after her little
frolic. All that was true enough. And how charming it would be to
have such a dainty companion! then the fun, the fancy, the whim of it
all. What was the use of setting out to seek adventures if I didn't
pursue them when found.

Well, the long and short of it was that I agreed to undertake the
adventure, provided that Nicolete could win over the lady whom at the
beginning of the chapter I declared too charming to be described as an
obstacle.

By nine o'clock the following morning the fairy tailors, as Nicolete
called them, were at work on the fairy clothes, and, at the end of
three days, there came by parcel-post a bulky unromantic-looking
brown-paper parcel, which it was my business to convey to Nicolete
under cover of the dark.

CHAPTER VII

FROM THE MORNING STAR TO THE MOON

I quite realise that this book is written perhaps only just in time for
the motive of these two or three chapters to be appreciated in its
ancient piquancy. Very soon, alas! the sexes will be robbed of one of
the first and most thrilling motives of romance, the motive of As You
Like It, the romance of wearing each other's clothes. Alas, that every
advance of reason should mean a corresponding retreat of romance! It
is only reasonable that woman, being--have you yet realised the
fact?--a biped like her brothers, should, when she takes to her
brothers' recreations, dress as those recreations demand; and yet the
death of Rosalind is a heavy price to pay for the lady bicyclist. So
soon as the two sexes wear the same clothes, they may as well wear
nothing; the game of sex is up. In this matter, as in others, we
cannot both have our cake and eat it. All romance, like all
temptation, is founded on the Fascination of the Exception. So soon as
the exception becomes, instead of merely proving, the rule, that
particular avenue of romance is closed. The New Woman of the future
will be the woman with the petticoats, she who shall restore the
ancient Eleusinian mysteries of the silk skirt and the tea-gown.

Happily for me, my acquaintance among the Rosalinds of the bicycle, at
this period of my life, was but slight, and thus no familiarity with
the tweed knickerbocker feminine took off the edge of my delight on
first beholding Nicolete clothed in like manhood with ourselves, and
yet, delicious p