orners that make vice, vice! We
artists--we have no vices.

"And then he's frantic with repentance. And wants to be cruel to fallen
women and decent harmless sculptors of the simple nude--like me--and so
back to his panic again."

"Mrs. Grundy, I suppose, doesn't know he sins," I remarked.

"No? I'm not so sure.... But, bless her heart she's a woman.... She's
a woman. Then again you get Grundy with a large greasy smile--like
an accident to a butter tub--all over his face, being Liberal
Minded--Grundy in his Anti-Puritan moments, 'trying not to see Harm in
it'--Grundy the friend of innocent pleasure. He makes you sick with the
Harm he's trying not to see in it...

"And that's why everything's wrong, Ponderevo. Grundy, damn him! stands
in the light, and we young people can't see. His moods affect us. We
catch his gusts of panic, his disease of nosing, his greasiness. We
don't know what we may think, what we may say, he does his silly
utmost to prevent our reading and seeing the one thing, the one sort of
discussion we find--quite naturally and properly--supremely interesting.
So we don't adolescence; we blunder up to sex. Dare--dare to look--and
he may dirt you for ever! The girls are terror-stricken to silence by
his significant whiskers, by the bleary something in his eyes."

Suddenly Ewart, with an almost Jack-in-the-box effect, sat up.

"He's about us everywhere, Ponderevo," he said, very solemnly.
"Sometimes--sometimes I think he is--in our blood. In MINE."

He regarded me for my opinion very earnestly, with his pipe in the
corner of his mouth.

"You're the remotest cousin he ever had," I said.

I reflected. "Look here, Ewart," I asked, "how would you have things
different?"

He wrinkled up his queer face, regarded the wait and made his pipe
gurgle for a space, thinking deeply.

"There are complications, I admit. We've grown up under the terror of
Grundy and that innocent but docile and--yes--formidable lady, his
wife. I don't know how far the complications aren't a disease, a sort of
bleaching under the Grundy shadow.... It is possible there are things
I have still to learn about women.... Man has eaten of the Tree of
Knowledge. His innocence is gone. You can't have your cake and eat
it. We're in for knowledge; let's have it plain and straight. I should
begin, I think, by abolishing the ideas of decency and indecency...."

"Grundy would have fits!" I injected.

"Grundy, Ponderevo, would have cold dou