to educate our boys and girls, when those teachers are shamefully underpaid?  Nothing wrong when the mothers of this great country let their youngsters go to the dark motion picture halls and night after night in thousands of towns over all this broad land see pictures that the juvenile court and the educators and keepers of reform schools say make burglars, crooks, and murderers of our boys and vampires of our girls?  Nothing wrong when these young adolescent girls ape you and wear stockings rolled under their knees below their skirts and use a lip stick and paint their faces and darken their eyes and pluck their eyebrows and absolutely do not know what shame is?  Nothing wrong when you may find in any city women standing at street corners distributing booklets on birth control?  Nothing wrong when great magazines print no page or picture without its sex appeal?  Nothing wrong when the automobile, so convenient for the innocent little run out of town, presents the greatest evil that ever menaced American girls!  Nothing wrong when money is god—­when luxury, pleasure, excitement, speed are the striven for?  Nothing wrong when some of your husbands spend more of their time with other women than with you?  Nothing wrong with jazz—­where the lights go out in the dance hall and the dancers jiggle and toddle and wiggle in a frenzy?  Nothing wrong in a country where the greatest college cannot report birth of one child to each graduate in ten years?  Nothing wrong with race suicide and the incoming horde of foreigners? . . .  Nothing wrong with you women who cannot or will not stand childbirth?  Nothing wrong with most of you, when if you did have a child, you could not nurse it? . . .  Oh, my God, there’s nothing wrong with America except that she staggers under a Titanic burden that only mothers of sons can remove! . . .  You doll women, you parasites, you toys of men, you silken-wrapped geisha girls, you painted, idle, purring cats, you parody of the females of your species—­ find brains enough if you can to see the doom hanging over you and revolt before it is too late!”

CHAPTER XI

Carley burst in upon her aunt.

“Look at me, Aunt Mary!” she cried, radiant and exultant.  “I’m going back out West to marry Glenn and live his life!”

The keen old eyes of her aunt softened and dimmed.  “Dear Carley, I’ve known that for a long time.  You’ve found yourself at last.”

Then Carley breathlessly babbled her hastily formed plans, every word of which seemed to rush her onward.

“You’re going to surprise Glenn again?” queried Aunt Mary.

“Oh, I must!  I want to see his face when I tell him.”

“Well, I hope he won’t surprise you,” declared the old lady.  “When did you hear from him last?”

“In January.  It seems ages—­but—­Aunt Mary, you don’t imagine Glenn—­”

“I imagine nothing,” interposed her aunt.  “It will turn out happily and I’ll have some peace in my old age.  But, Carley, what’s to become of me?”