go back to the Oriental system!"

Mr. Stanley poured wine. "Damned Rascal!" he said. "Isn't there a
brother to kick him?"

"Mere satisfaction," reflected Ogilvy. "Mere sensuality. I rather think
they have kicked him, from the tone of some of the letters. Nice, of
course. But it doesn't alter the situation."

"It's these Rascals," said Mr. Stanley, and paused.

"Always has been," said Ogilvy. "Our interest lies in heading them off."

"There was a time when girls didn't get these extravagant ideas."

"Lydia Languish, for example. Anyhow, they didn't run about so much."

"Yes. That's about the beginning. It's these damned novels. All this
torrent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the press. These
sham ideals and advanced notions. Women who Dids, and all that kind of
thing...."

Ogilvy reflected. "This girl--she's really a very charming, frank
person--had had her imagination fired, so she told me, by a school
performance of Romeo and Juliet."

Mr. Stanley decided to treat that as irrelevant. "There ought to be a
Censorship of Books. We want it badly at the present time. Even WITH
the Censorship of Plays there's hardly a decent thing to which a man can
take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint of suggestion everywhere.
What would it be without that safeguard?"

Ogilvy pursued his own topic. "I'm inclined to think, Stanley, myself
that as a matter of fact it was the expurgated Romeo and Juliet did the
mischief. If our young person hadn't had the nurse part cut out, eh? She
might have known more and done less. I was curious about that. All they
left it was the moon and stars. And the balcony and 'My Romeo!'"

"Shakespeare is altogether different from the modern stuff. Altogether
different. I'm not discussing Shakespeare. I don't want to Bowdlerize
Shakespeare. I'm not that sort I quite agree. But this modern miasma--"

Mr. Stanley took mustard savagely.

"Well, we won't go into Shakespeare," said Ogilvy "What interests me
is that our young women nowadays are running about as free as air
practically, with registry offices and all sorts of accommodation round
the corner. Nothing to check their proceedings but a declining habit of
telling the truth and the limitations of their imaginations. And in that
respect they stir up one another. Not my affair, of course, but I think
we ought to teach them more or restrain them more. One or the other.
They're too free for their innocence or too innocent for th