it fully,
adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel
story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have
picked man after man out of English public life, the men with active
imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering
old-woman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! You
say I ought to be penitent--"

Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly.

"I'm boiling with indignation," I said. "I lay in bed last night and
went through it all. What in God's name was to be expected of us but
what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I
recalled all I've had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told
and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and debasement. We all
are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful
things in life--like peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light,
never given a touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive,
canting, humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it!
The shame of it! The very savages in Australia initiate their children
better than the English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a
view of what they call morality that didn't make it show as shabby
subservience, as the meanest discretion, an abject submission to
unreasonable prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the
dictation of pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught--we
were mumbled at! And when we found that the thing they called unclean,
unclean, was Pagan beauty--God! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a
pride and splendour like bathing in the sunlight after dust and grime!"

"Yes," said Britten. "That's all very well--"

I interrupted him. "I know there's a case--I'm beginning to think it a
valid case against us; but we never met it! There's a steely pride in
self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and
think and act--untrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the current
thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in a
cage by itself!" I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him.
"This is a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world,
and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call
immorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime
if they care for it, and wipe it?--damn them! I am burning now to say:
'Yes, we did this a