he rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically.
We had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait
of our feasting,--he didn't balance sideways and was much alarmed, and
afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my canoe,
let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but not positively harmful
paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters. Still it
was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the books and
not of Altiora that that was not the date of my betrothal.

I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from
proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and what urged me forward
at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember one's resolutions
than to remember the moods and suggestions that produced them.

Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to
Altiora; it was something that happened to the adolescent and unmarried
when you threw them together under the circumstances of health, warmth
and leisure. It happened with the kindly and approving smiles of the
more experienced elders who had organised these proximities. The young
people married, settled down, children ensued, and father and mother
turned their minds, now decently and properly disillusioned, to other
things. That to Altiora was the normal sexual life, and she believed it
to be the quality of the great bulk of the life about her.

One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide
temperamental difference one finds in the values of things relating to
sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in charity and
imaginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards at all, and indeed
for no single man nor woman does there seem to be any fixed standard, so
much do the accidents of circumstances and one's physical phases affect
one's interpretations. There is nothing in the whole range of sexual
fact that may not seem supremely beautiful or humanly jolly or
magnificently wicked or disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant,
according to the eye that sees or the mood that colours. Here is
something that may fill the skies and every waking hour or be almost
completely banished from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less
than nothing on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules as though in
these matters all men and women were commensurable one with another,
with an equal steadfast passion and an equal