deal of wit flowed; brilliant apostrophes
were launched forth and keen repartees were returned. But when Professor
Haddi began to speak he overwhelmed everybody.

"It is the same with our ideas on love as with our ideas on everything
else," said he, "they rest upon anterior habits whose very memory has
been effaced. In morals, the limitations that have lost their grounds
for existing, the most useless obligations, the cruelest and most
injurious restraints, are because of their profound antiquity and the
mystery of their origin, the least disputed and the least disputable as
well as the most respected, and they are those that cannot be violated
without incurring the most severe blame. All morality relative to the
relations of the sexes is founded on this principle: that a woman once
obtained belongs to the man, that she is his property like his horse or
his weapons. And this having ceased to be true, absurdities result from
it, such as the marriage or contract of sale of a woman to a man, with
clauses restricting the right of ownership introduced as a consequence
of the gradual diminution of the claims of the possessor.

"The obligation imposed on a girl that she should bring her virginity
to her husband comes from the times when girls were married immediately
they were of a marriageable age. It is ridiculous that a girl who
marries at twenty-five or thirty should be subject to that obligation.
You will, perhaps, say that it is a present with which her husband, if
she gets one at last, will be gratified; but every moment we see men
wooing married women and showing themselves perfectly satisfied to take
them as they find them.

"Still, even in our own day, the duty of girls is determined in
religious morality by the old belief that God, the most powerful of
warriors, is polygamous, that he has reserved all maidens for himself,
and that men can only take those whom he has left. This belief, although
traces of it exist in several metaphors of mysticism, is abandoned
to-day, by most civilised peoples. However, it still dominates the
education of girls not only among our believers, but even among our
free-thinkers, who, as a rule, think freely for the reason that they do
not think at all.

"Discretion means ability to separate and discern. We say that a girl is
discreet when she knows nothing at all. We cultivate her ignorance. In
spite of all our care the most discreet know something, for we cannot
conceal from them th