it is
like carrying a torch into a powder magazine. They feel they cannot
trust their own minds beyond the experience, tested usages, and
conventions of the ages, because they know how many of those who have
ventured further have been blinded by mists and clouds of rhetoric, lost
in inexplicable puzzles and wrecked disastrously. There in those half
explored and altogether unsettled hinterlands, lurk desires that sting
like adders and hatreds cruel as hell....

And then I went on--I do not clearly remember now the exact line of
argument I adopted--to urge upon her that our insoluble puzzles were not
necessarily insoluble puzzles for the world at large, that no one
soldier fights anything but a partial battle, and that it wasn't an
absolute condemnation of me to declare that I went on living and working
for social construction with the cardinal riddles of social order, so
far as they affected her, unsolved. Wasn't I at any rate preparing
apparatus for that huge effort at solution that mankind must ultimately
make? Wasn't this dredging out and deepening of the channels of thought
about the best that we could hope to do at the present time, seeing that
to launch a keel of speculation prematurely was only to strand oneself
among hopeless reefs and confusions? Better prepare for a voyage
to-morrow than sail to destruction to-day.

Whatever I put in that forgotten part of my letter was put less
strikingly than my first admissions, and anyhow it was upon these that
Mary pounced to the disregard of any other point. "There you are," she
wrote, with something like elation, "there is a tiger in the garden and
you won't talk or think about it for fear of growing excited. That is my
grievance against so much historical and political and social
discussion; its hopeless futility because of its hopeless omissions. You
plan the world's future, taking the women and children for granted, with
Egotistical Sex, as you call it, a prowling monster upsetting
everything you do...."

But I will not give you that particular letter in its order, nor its
successors. Altogether she wrote me twenty-two letters, and I one or two
more than that number to her, and--a thing almost inevitable in a
discussion by correspondence--there is a lot of overlapping and
recapitulation. Those letters spread over a space of nearly two and a
half years. Again and again she insists upon the monstrous exaggeration
of the importance of sex in human life and of the nee