n extricating itself from the
shackles of Orientalism has not devoted much worry to the Condition of
Woman.

In Morovenia woman is still unliberated. She does not dine at a
palm-garden or hop into a victoria on Thursday afternoon to go to the
meeting of a club organized to propagate cults. If she met a cult face
to face she would not recognize it.

Nor does she suspect, as she sits in her prison apartment, peeping out
through the lattice at the monotonous drift of the street life, that her
sisters in far-away Michigan are organizing and raising missionary funds
in her behalf.

She does not read the dressmaking periodicals. She never heard of the
Wednesday matinee. When she takes the air she rides in a carriage that
has a sheltering hood, and she is veiled up to the eyes, and she must
never lean out to wriggle her little finger-tips at men lolling in front
of the cafes. She must not see the men. She may look at them, but she
must not see them. No wonder the sisters in Michigan are organizing to
batter down the walls of tradition, and bring to her the more recent
privileges of her sex!

Two years ago, when this story had its real beginning, the social status
of woman in Morovenia was not greatly different from what it is to-day,
or what it was two centuries ago.

Woman had two important duties assigned to her. One was to hide herself
from the gaze of the multitude, and the other was to be beautiful--that
is, fat. A woman who was plump, or buxom, or chubby might be classed as
passably attractive, but only the fat women were irresistible. A woman
weighing two hundred pounds was only two-thirds as beautiful as one
weighing three hundred. Those grading below one hundred and fifty were
verging upon the impossible.

II

KALORA'S AFFLICTION

If it had been planned to make this an old-fashioned discursive novel,
say of the Victor Hugo variety, the second chapter would expend itself
upon a philosophical discussion of Fat and a sensational showing of how
and why the presence or absence of adipose tissue, at certain important
crises, had altered the destinies of the whole race.

The subject offers vast possibilities. It involves the physical
attractiveness of every woman in History and permits one to speculate
wildly as to what might have happened if Cleopatra had weighed forty
pounds heavier, if Elizabeth had been a gaunt and wiry creature, or if
Joan of Arc had been so bulky that she could not have fastened on