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 matinée. 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 cafés. 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.