For poor Elizabeth Huszar, pronounced Eleeza Betooser, had had no chance whatever to familiarize herself with the new ideas of advanced feminism.  Her notions of “free unions” had been derived from a quite different world, whose ideas were not new, but on the contrary very, very old, and were “advanced” only on the road to perdition.  She judged Jimmie’s behaviour according to thoroughly old standards, and she was broken-hearted, overwhelmed with grief and shame.  He was like all the rest of men—­and when she had fondly thought he was different!  He despised her and spit upon her—­a woman he had picked up in a brothel.

Poor Jimmie was stunned.  He was conscious of no disrespect for Lizzie, it had not occurred to him to think that she might take the matter that way.  But so she had taken it, beyond doubt, and with intensity that frightened him.  He would not have believed that so many tears could stream from one woman’s eyes—­nor that his good, broad-faced, honest wife could be so abject in her misery.  “Oh, I knowed it, I knowed it all along—­it would be that way!  I hadn’t never ought to married you—­you know I told you so?”

“But, Lizzie!” pleaded the husband.  “You’re mistaken.  That hadn’t nothin’ to do with it.”

She turned upon him wildly, her fingers stuck out as if she would claw him.  “You mean to tell me if you hadn’t ’a married a woman off the street, you’d ‘a gone chasin’ a fluffy-haired girl?  If you’d ’a had a decent wife, that you knowed had some rights—­”

“Lizzie!” he protested in consternation.  “Listen here—­”

But she was not to be stopped.  “Everybody said I was a fool; but I went an’ done it, ‘cause you swore you’d never hold it up to me!  An’ I went an’ had them children”—­Lizzie swept her arm at the children, as if to wipe them off the earth, to which they had come by a cruel mistake.

Jimmie Junior, who was old enough to know that something serious was happening, and whose instinct was all against being wiped off the earth, began to howl wildly; and that set off the little ones—­soon they were all three of them going at the top of their lungs.  “Boo-hoo-hoo!”

It was truly a terrible climax to a romance.  Jimmie, almost distracted, seized the hand of his injured spouse.  “It’s all nonsense!” he cried.  “What they been tellin’ you!  I ain’t done a thing, Lizzie!  I only walked home with her one night.”

But Lizzie answered that one night was plenty enough—­she knew that from intimate and hateful experience.  “And I know them fluffy-headed kind that frizzes their hair.  What does she want to walk home at night with married men fer?  And talkin’ about the things she does—­”

“She don’t mean no harm, Lizzie—­she’s tryin’ to help workin’ women.  It’s what’s called birth control—­she wants to teach women—­”

“If she wants to teach women, why don’t she talk to the women!  What’s she all the time talkin’ to men fer?  You think you can tell me tales like that—­me, that’s been what I have?” And Lizzie went off into another fit, worse than ever.