in the fight, but simply let it take the form of an enthroned and
laurelled bicycle--for the moment woman mounted that apparently innocent
machine, it carried her on the high-road to freedom. On that she could
go not only where she pleased, but--what is even more to the point--with
whom she pleased. The free companionship of man and woman had begun.
Then and forever ended the old system of courtship, which seems so
laughable and even incredible today. One was no longer expected to pay
court to one's beloved, sitting stiffly on straight-backed chairs in a
chill drawing-room in the non-conducting, or non-conducive, presence of
still chillier maiden aunts. The doom of the _duenna_ was sounded; the
chill drawing-room was exchanged for "the open road" and the whispering
woodland; and soon it is to come about that a man shall propose to his
wife high up in the blue heavens, in an airship softly swaying at anchor
in the wake of the evening star.




VI

THE LAST CALL


I don't know whether or not the cry "Last call for the dining-car"
affects others as it affects me, but for me it always has a stern,
fateful sound, suggestive of momentous opportunity fast slipping away,
opportunity that can never come again; and, on the occasions when I have
disregarded it, I have been haunted with a sense of the neglected
"might-have-been."