to speak
freely? You take your stand before the Venus of the Capitol; you bid
the attendant make it revolve slowly, and you begin a lecture to your
wife, your sister, or your young cousin, on the glories of the
masterpiece. You point out in detail how admirably Praxiteles has
exhibited every beauty of the female frame. Other ladies are standing
by you smile blandly, and include them in your audience."

Mallard interrupted with a laugh.

"Well, why not?" continued the other. "This isn't the _gabinetto_ at
Naples, surely?"

"But you are well aware that, practically, it comes to the same thing.
How often is one half pained, half amused, at the behaviour of women in
the Tribune at Florence! They are in a false position; it is absurd to
ridicule them for what your own sensations justify. For my own part, I
always leave my wife and Mrs. Baske to go about these galleries without
my company. If I can't be honestly at my ease, I won't make pretence of
being so."

"All this is true enough, but the prejudice is absurd. We ought to
despise it and struggle against it."

"Despise it, many of us do, theoretically. But to make practical
demonstrations against it, is to oppose, as I said, all the
civilization of our world. Perhaps there will come a time once more
when sculpture will be justified; at present the art doesn't and can't
exist. Its relics belong to museums--in the English sense of the word."

"You only mean by this," said Mallard, "that art isn't for the
multitude. We know that well enough."

"But there's a special difficulty about this point. We come across it
in literature as well. How is it that certain pages in literature,
which all intellectual people agree in pro flouncing just as pure as
they are great, could never be read aloud, say, in a family circle,
without occasioning pain and dismay? No need to give illustrations;
they occur to you in abundance. We skip them, or we read mutteringly,
or we say frankly that this is not adapted for reading aloud. Yet no
man would frown if he found his daughter bent over the book. There's
something radically wrong here."

"This is the old question of our English Puritanism. In France, here in
Italy, there is far less of such feeling."

"Far less; but why must there be any at all? And Puritanism isn't a
sufficient explanation. The English Puritans of the really Puritan time
had freedom of conversation which would horrify us of to-day. We become
more and more prudish as