es them in great quantities for motormen and
conductors. Had we not been led by easy grades to the acceptance, these
things would have cried out for our eyes. Nowhere in the Orient or the
Islands, is the male form made so monstrous. Had some one drawn them for
us, in a place where we are accustomed to look for caricature; had we
seen them in comic opera, or upon the legs of a Pacific Islander; or had
we come from another planet, there would have been no mistake as to the
debauchery of taste they represented. Over all, was a sadness that this
good man should be shamed so.

And when one thinks of what women have done in obedience to the
tradesman's instincts in late years; narrowing their waists one season,
widening their hips or accentuating the bust another, loosening the
abdomen as from a tightened stem the next--these are the real
obscenities which we perform in the shelter of the herd. Exposure is
frank and clean-hearted compared to these manifestations of human
beings; so that one with the beginnings of fresher vision cries out, "If
I do not know, if I have not taste and cannot see truly, at least let me
do as others do not...." And again the heaviness of it all lies in the
bringing up of children _not to revolt_.

* * * * *

I talked of these matters to the Chapel group. Once I had seen a tall
man, who was going away, look down into the eyes of a little boy he
loved, saying: "Never do anything in secret that you wouldn't do before
your best friend. The fact is, the only way you can ever be _alone_ is
to be beneath yourself." I remembered that as something very wise and
warm.

It came to me, as I talked, that what we love best in children is their
freshness of eye. We repeat their sayings with pleasure because they see
things without the world-training; they see objects in many cases as
they are. It was but a step then to the fact that the artist or worker
who brings up anything worthy, has done just this--reproduced the thing
more nearly as it is, because of a natural freshness of vision, or
because he has won back to himself through years of labour, the absolute
need of relying upon what his own senses and his own spirit bring him.
It was this reliance that I was endeavouring to inculcate in every day's
work in the Chapel.

Again and again the children have made me see the dissolving of
character which comes from all forms of acting, even the primary defect
of the novel as a ve