up,
to see whether she blushed at what the ebbing wine revealed. If the
debutante blushed, they laughed at her for her innocence; if she did
not, she was laughed at for being too knowing."

"Do you propose," asked Anne, "that the custom should be revived at
Buckingham Palace?"

"I do not," said Mr. Scogan. "I merely quoted the anecdote as an
illustration of the customs, so genially frank, of the sixteenth
century. I might have quoted other anecdotes to show that the customs
of the seventeenth and eighteenth, of the fifteenth and fourteenth
centuries, and indeed of every other century, from the time of Hammurabi
onward, were equally genial and equally frank. The only century in which
customs were not characterised by the same cheerful openness was the
nineteenth, of blessed memory. It was the astonishing exception. And
yet, with what one must suppose was a deliberate disregard of history,
it looked upon its horribly pregnant silences as normal and natural and
right; the frankness of the previous fifteen or twenty thousand years
was considered abnormal and perverse. It was a curious phenomenon."

"I entirely agree." Mary panted with excitement in her effort to bring
out what she had to say. "Havelock Ellis says..."

Mr. Scogan, like a policeman arresting the flow of traffic, held up his
hand. "He does; I know. And that brings me to my next point: the nature
of the reaction."

"Havelock Ellis..."

"The reaction, when it came--and we may say roughly that it set in
a little before the beginning of this century--the reaction was to
openness, but not to the same openness as had reigned in the earlier
ages. It was to a scientific openness, not to the jovial frankness
of the past, that we returned. The whole question of Amour became a
terribly serious one. Earnest young men wrote in the public prints that
from this time forth it would be impossible ever again to make a joke
of any sexual matter. Professors wrote thick books in which sex was
sterilised and dissected. It has become customary for serious young
women, like Mary, to discuss, with philosophic calm, matters of which
the merest hint would have sufficed to throw the youth of the sixties
into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no
doubt. But still"--Mr. Scogan sighed.--"I for one should like to see,
mingled with this scientific ardour, a little more of the jovial spirit
of Rabelais and Chaucer."

"I entirely disagree with you," said Mary.