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They have no more tea left. Now is the moment ripe." With these spirited words, my mother and her troops proceeded to charge down Queen's Road upon the unsuspecting Wenuses. But they had reckoned without the enemy.
There, grouped picturesquely round a quantity of large tanks, stood the Wenuses, blowing assiduously through pellucid pipettes and simultaneously chanting in tones of unearthly gravity a strain poignantly suggestive of baffled hopes, thwarted aspirations and impending departure. So absorbed were they in their strange preparations, that they were entirely unconscious of my presence.
The last stage of struggle-for-dress, which is to us still remote, had embellished their charms, heightened their heels and enlarged their hearts. Moreover, the population of Wenus consisted exclusively of Invisible Men and the Wenuses were about tired of it. Let us, however, not judge them too harshly.
I shall not attempt exhaustively to describe the indescribable. It is enough to assure the sober reader that, grotesque and foolish as it may seem, this is absolutely true, and to record that after the glimpse I had of the Wenuses emerging from the Crinoline in which they had come to the earth from their planet, a kind of fascination paralysed my actions.
My wife's plan of campaign was simple but masterly. She would enlist an army of enormous bulk, march on the Wenuses in Westbourne Grove, and wipe them from the face of the earth. Such was my wife's project. My wife's first step was to obtain, as the nucleus of attack, those women to whom the total loss of men would be most disastrous.
Meanwhile my mother, at the head of the south wing of the army, which had been entirely overlooked by the Wenuses, stood watching the destruction of my wife's host a figure petrified with alarm and astonishment. One by one she watched her sisters in arms succumb to the awful Tea-Tray. Then it was that this intrepid woman rose to her greatest height. "Come!" she cried to her Amazons. "Come!
"Pozzy," she said, "this is my opportunity and I mean to use it. I was kept doing nothing between pages 68 and 296 of the other book, and this time I mean to work. Look at these fools rushing to their doom. In another moment they will be mashed, mashed to jelly; and you too, unless I prevent it. I know what these Wenuses are. Haven't I had a scientific training?
These 'ere Wenuses they wants to be Mas, that's the long and the short of it. Only " "Yes?" I said, more than ever impressed by the man's pyramidal intuition. "They can't stand the climate. They're too what is it? exotic." We sat staring at each other. "And what will they do?" I humbly asked, grovelling unscientifically at his feet. "That's what I've been thinking," said the gunner.
My mother, who has exquisite taste in armour, had donned a superb Cinque-Cento cuirass, a short Zouave jacket embroidered with sequins, accordion-pleated bloomers, luminous leggings, brown Botticelli boots and one tiger-skin spat. Between the two hosts was the empty road before the Universal Provider's Emporium. The Wenuses were within the building.
I make a point of never explaining the escape of my wife, whether from Martians or Wenuses; but that night, as Commander-in-Chief, she issued this cataleptic despatch: "The Wenuses are able to paralyse all but strong-minded women with their deadly Tea-Tray. Also they burn a Red Weed, the smoke of which has smothered our troops in Westbourne Grove.
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