has a man any right by any standards to use women as this man has
used them?

"By any standards?"

The doctor frowned and nodded his head slowly with the corners of his
mouth drawn in.

For some years now an intellectual reverie had been playing an
increasing part in the good doctor's life. He was writing this book of
his, writing it very deliberately and laboriously, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A
NEW AGE, but much more was he dreaming and thinking about this book.
Its publication was to mark an epoch in human thought and human affairs
generally, and create a considerable flutter of astonishment in the
doctor's own little world. It was to bring home to people some various
aspects of one very startling proposition: that human society had
arrived at a phase when the complete restatement of its fundamental
ideas had become urgently necessary, a phase when the slow, inadequate,
partial adjustments to two centuries of changing conditions had to give
place to a rapid reconstruction of new fundamental ideas. And it was
a fact of great value in the drama of these secret dreams that the
directive force towards this fundamentally reconstructed world should be
the pen of an unassuming Harley Street physician, hitherto not suspected
of any great excesses of enterprise.

The written portions of this book were already in a highly polished
state. They combined a limitless freedom of proposal with a smooth
urbanity of manner, a tacit denial that the thoughts of one intelligent
being could possibly be shocking to another. Upon this the doctor was
very insistent. Conduct, he held, could never be sufficiently discreet,
thought could never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat
a law or an institution as a thing as rigidly right as a natural law.
That the social well-being demands. But as a scientific man, in one's
stated thoughts and in public discussion, the case was altogether
different. There was no offence in any possible hypothesis or in the
contemplation of any possibility. Just as when one played a game one was
bound to play in unquestioning obedience to the laws and spirit of the
game, but if one was not playing that game then there was no reason why
one should not contemplate the completest reversal of all its methods
and the alteration and abandonment of every rule. Correctness of
conduct, the doctor held, was an imperative concomitant of all really
free thinking. Revolutionary speculation is one of those things that
mu