or a problem of. Then it got smothered pretty quick. And a fad or a problem always breeds a host of parasites or hangers-on. Why, as soon as I saw the advanced idealist fools—they’re generally the middle-class, shabby-genteel families that catch Spiritualism and Theosophy and those sort of complaints, at the end of the epidemic—that catch on at the tail-end of things and think they’ve caught something brand, shining, new;—as soon as I saw them, and the problem spielers and notoriety-hunters of both sexes, beginning to hang round Australian Unionism, I knew it was doomed. And so it was. The straight men were disgusted, or driven out. There are women who hang on for the same reason that a girl will sometimes go into the dock and swear an innocent man’s life away. But as soon as they see that the cause is dying, they drop it at once, and wait for another. They come like bloody dingoes round a calf, and only leave the bones. They’re about as democratic as the crows. And the rotten ‘sex-problem’ sort of thing is the cause of it all; it poisons weak minds—and strong ones too sometimes.
“Why, you could make a problem out of Epsom salts. You might argue as to why human beings want Epsom salts, and try to trace the causes that led up to it. I don’t like the taste of Epsom salts—it’s nasty in the mouth—but when I feel that way I take ‘em, and I feel better afterwards; and that’s good enough for me. We might argue that black is white, and white is black, and neither of ‘em is anything, and nothing is everything; and a woman’s a man and a man’s a woman, and it’s really the man that
