that out of your mind at once. Modern English
civilisation has entirely failed to produce men who can be at once
gentlemen and fiery lovers. We have wanted things both ways, and that is
why we have failed. We have wanted nice clean-minded men with whom we
could walk, talk, and play games freely. But that means men who can
exercise self-control. Now, of course, we are certainly free to enjoy
men as safe playmates all through our youth; but we are, I'm afraid,
also free to be bored with them as husbands for the rest of our lives."

CHAPTER VI

There are many people who would have considered Mrs. Delarayne a selfish
mother. Despite the fact that no man, woman, or child has ever yet been
known to perform an unselfish action, the superstition still holds
ground, that "selfish" and "unselfish" are two different and possible
descriptions of human life and action. Believing, as we do, however,
that no intellectually honest man can any longer attach any significance
to these words, it cannot be admitted in these pages that Mrs. Delarayne
was selfish. Neither was she at all conscious of any evil impulses when,
standing at the dining-room window on her "Inner Light" afternoon, she
watched her two children leave the house on their way to the "Claude
hag," as Leonetta called the lady. On the contrary, she felt wonderfully
free, exceptionally happy, profoundly relieved. The big house was
silent. She was alone. She even had to suppress the half-formed longing
that it might always be so.

She knew that Cleopatra felt no deep sympathy with any part of the
"Inner Light" doctrine, and she was convinced, before enquiring, that
Leonetta would sympathise with it even less. Although, therefore, she
expected a number of young men that afternoon,--Lord Henry, St. Maur,
and Malster, among them,--who might have interested her daughters, she
was not in the least conscious of having acted with deliberate hostility
in arranging so neatly that they should be out of the house when these
gentlemen came.

To explain precisely what the "Inner Light" meetings meant to Mrs.
Delarayne would entail such a long discussion of the relation of women's
religiosity in general to sex and to self-deception, that it would
require almost the compass of another independent treatise to deal with
it adequately.

In a word Mrs. Delarayne suffered, as a large number of modern women
suffer, from receiving no sure and reliable guidance from men. As a
widow this