which to buy shoes for the children to-morrow." Or he may have said, "the slippers for your pretty feet"—when marriage was that way, everything in it divine just died! It shall never be so again.
Hear the new woman. "We shall have more love about marriage and less law," she will say. "And we shall never let them lock us in. Love always laughed even yesterday at the clumsy locksmiths who thought they had bolted and barred the Doll's House with ordinance and ritual. For how love cometh, we may not say, who are mute before so much as the mystery of the tint of the rose or the perfume of the lilies in June. Nor how love goeth, dare we define. Presumptuous mortals who have thought to hold back love with law and enactment, have made of marriage an empty form, echoing with the mockery of the happiness that fled."
Well, we will say that she is talking like this under the stars. The next morning at breakfast she will come right to the point. And I know where she will begin. "That old doctrine of coverture," she will say, "take it away!" There is a place for the relics of an antiquated civilisation. In the museum of the Tower of London they have in a glass case the little model of the rack and thumb screw. The executioner's block and the headsman's axe is an important and impressive exhibit. And there are the coats of mail of early warriors. It is customary, I believe, to put there all things that are passing into desuetude: a hansom cab went in the other day. Now let them take also this ancient doctrine of cov-
