As it is of the utmost importance for Society that Irregular births should be discouraged, it follows that no woman who has any Irregularities in her ancestry is a fit partner for one who desires that his posterity should rise by regular degrees in the social scale.

Now the Irregularity of a male is a matter of measurement; but as all women are straight, and therefore visibly Regular so to speak, one has to devise some other means of ascertaining what I may call their invisible Irregularity, that is to say their potential Irregularities as regards possible offspring. This is effected by carefully-kept pedigrees, which are preserved and supervised by the State; and without a certified pedigree no woman is allowed to marry.

Now it might have been supposed that a Circle⁠—proud of his ancestry and regardful for a posterity which might possibly issue hereafter in a Chief Circle⁠—would be more careful than any other to choose a wife who had no blot on her escutcheon. But it is not so. The care in choosing a Regular wife appears to diminish as one rises in the social scale. Nothing would induce an aspiring Isosceles, who had hopes of generating an Equilateral son, to take a wife who reckoned a single Irregularity among her ancestors; a Square or Pentagon, who is confident that his family is steadily on the rise, does not inquire above the five-hundredth generation; a Hexagon or Dodecagon is even more careless of the wife’s pedigree; but a Circle has been known deliberately to take a wife who has had an Irregular great-grandfather, and all because of some slight superiority of lustre, or because of the charms of a low voice⁠—which, with us, even more than you, is thought “an excellent thing in woman.”