CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE




HOW SIR ROGER COMPORTED HIMSELF IN THE DEBATE WITH THE C.U.N.T.S.





   This book is getting along very slowly; so I shall skip a century of chapters to encourage myself with the Illusion of Progress.


   To illustrate the remarkable precocity of Sir Roger Bloxam, it may here be stated that he said, at the early age of nine, that Women can never be any good, just as if he were grown up and knew all about it. Well rebuked he the pudding-faced, sausage-bodied, flabbinesses of feminism, did he, the saucy youngster. ``Look you, thing'', quoth he courteously (all things considered) to the Cambridge University New Testament Society and the Cincinatti Uplift New Thought Society, and other such, ``look you, a woman must either be a mother or not a mother.'' And all they cried ``Ay'', assenting. ``Well then'', he went on ``what is a mother? The most animal of all traits is motherhood. The nearer a mother is to the cow, the better mother she! What is her life? A menstruation, a befutterment, a gestation, a parturition, a suckling -- and so it goes. She cannot mix in society; her duties as well as her vanity forbid it. She must perforce leave dinner half tasted -- the baby's hungry! Oh God! I nauseate to contemplate the revolting details -- the filthy rags, the hideous sicknesses, the deformed belly, the foulness of childbirth, the cow-udders that appease the brat's yell -- oh God! How can she do aught human, when she is dragged down to beastliness for half her life? No, say what you will, a mother is but a sow, a wallowing sow.'' But one spake, saying: ``But all this does not apply to the woman who is not a mother. What of her?'' ``Pah!'' snorted Sir Roger, ``she is simply a bitch.'' But his opponent, staggering, struck his last blow. ``I'll grant you that'', say he ``but what of the woman who, having been a mother, is now so no more?'' ``Past bearing'' began the child --  but he fell to the floor in a fit, and was awarded the fight on a foul.


   By the coccyx of good Saint Antony of Padua, how I vomit at them! But the bitches are the best.