y rarely
understood.[208:1]

Many other nobler types of women have been playing with vice. Many wild
impulses have found strange expressions. Women have been very like
children playing at desperate rebels, who take up weapons to use far
more deadly than they knew. All this playing with love is detestable,
all of it. It shows a shameful shirking of responsibility. Women are the
custodians of manners in love, and very many, who have not dreamt of
the results of their slackenings, have been urging on the young to a
riotous festival, extravagant and disquieting.

It must, I think, be acknowledged that a vast impatience on the part of
women has made conduct less decent and less responsible. Lovers are more
reckless, even sometimes more consciously and vulgarly vicious. Women of
profound and steadfast emotional nature are rare. The great majority
now, perhaps, are not entirely light-minded, but they are less serious,
more noisily determined to do what they want, and get what they can both
out of men and out of life.

And the great fact that stands out from all this--the great need for our
private personal good as well as the public good--is the need of the
young for guidance and regulation, the necessity for refixing of moral
standards in sexual conduct, of formulating a code of good manners, to
meet the present needs. Nothing else, in my opinion, can avert even
greater disasters of license in the future, than those conditions we are
now facing.

VI

New wine is being put into old bottles and the wine of life is being
poured out and wasted. The old convention that irregular love is
excusable in the case of the man, but always to be punished in the case
of the woman will never again be accepted, at least not by women. It is
not women's ideas so much that are confused as their emotions, and
wills. Their impulses are not focused to any ideal. They are driven
hither and thither. That is the essential failure to-day. The irregular
unions, now so common, are but the more intimate aspect of a general
attitude toward life. Many women who have entered them, have done so
rather in a mood of protesting refractoriness than from any serviceable
desire; already they find themselves left after transitory passionate
friendships in difficult situations in which there is as yet no certain
tradition of behavior. And in this way, there is left open an inviting
door to those who are weak, as well as to those who are corrupt, to
behave ir