personal interest in
changing the established state of affairs. Habit and interest are in a
constantly recruited majority against conscious change and adjustment
in these matters. Drift rules us. The great mass of people, and an
overwhelming proportion of influential people, are people who have
banished their dreams and made their compromise. Wonderful and beautiful
possibilities are no longer to be thought about. They have given up
any aspirations for intense love, their splendid offspring, for keen
delights, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense
of righteousness as their compensation. It's a settled affair with
them, a settled, dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the
slightest reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to
the Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal
marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "I am for leaving all
these things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice, "Leave them
alone! Leave them all alone!"

That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed
passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and went
out.

For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone. I
developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music, for the
human figure in art--turning my heart to landscape. I wanted to sneer
at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable until I found
the effective sneer. In matters of private morals these were my most
uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of these things any more for
ever. I hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were not
of my opinion. I wanted to believe that their views were immoral and
objectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them as
at that level. I was, in fact, falling into the attitude of the normal
decent man.

And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds it
hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still dreams
beyond these commonplace acquiescences,--the appeal of beauty suddenly
shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer nights, the
sweetness of distant music....

It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the present
time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and so heavily,
that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people
and sterile people and people who have married