fully grown at eighteen. You want to force
her into a stuck-up, artificial, premature self-possession before she
has any self to possess. You just let her alone: she is right enough for
her years.

FRANKLYN. I have let her alone; and look at the result! Like all the
other young people who have been let alone, she becomes a Socialist.
That is, she becomes hopelessly demoralized.

CONRAD. Well, arnt you a Socialist?

FRANKLYN. Yes; but that is not the same thing. You and I were brought
up in the old bourgeois morality. We were taught bourgeois manners and
bourgeois points of honor. Bourgeois manners may be snobbish manners:
there may be no pleasure in them, as you say; but they are better than
no manners. Many bourgeois points of honor may be false; but at least
they exist. The women know what to expect and what is expected of
them. Savvy doesn't. She is a Bolshevist and nothing else. She has to
improvise her manners and her conduct as she goes along. It's often
charming, no doubt; but sometimes she puts her foot in it frightfully;
and then I feel that she is blaming me for not teaching her better.

CONRAD. Well, you have something better to teach her now, at all events.

FRANKLYN. Yes: but it is too late. She doesn't trust me now. She doesn't
talk about such things to me. She doesnt read anything I write. She
never comes to hear me lecture. I am out of it as far as Savvy is
concerned. [_He resumes his seat at the writing-table_].

CONRAD. I must have a talk to her.

FRANKLYN. Perhaps she will listen to you. You are not her father.

CONRAD. I sent her my last book. I can break the ice by asking her what
she made of it.

FRANKLYN. When she heard you were coming, she asked me whether all the
leaves were cut, in case it fell into your hands. She hasnt read a word
of it.

CONRAD [_rising indignantly_] What!

FRANKLYN [_inexorably_] Not a word of it.

CONRAD [_beaten_] Well, I suppose it's only natural. Biology is a dry
subject for a girl; and I am a pretty dry old codger.

[_He sits down again resignedly_].

FRANKLYN. Brother: if that is so; if biology as you have worked at it,
and religion as I have worked at it, are dry subjects like the old stuff
they taught under these names, and we two are dry old codgers, like the
old preachers and professors, then the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas
is a delusion. Unless this withered thing religion, and this dry thing
science, have come alive in our hands, alive and