fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace."
If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?"
her godmother might answer, "How is it that you are going there
till twelve?" If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants
and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions
partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look
a winged horse in the mouth. And it seemed to me that existence
was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain
of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did
not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger
than the picture. The veto might well be as wild as the vision;
it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters,
as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.

For this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy)
I never could join the young men of my time in feeling what they
called the general sentiment of REVOLT. I should have resisted,
let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their
definition I shall deal in another chapter. But I did not feel
disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious.
Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick
or the payment of a peppercorn: I was willing to hold the huge
estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy. It could not
well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all.
At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning.
I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation
against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and
unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make
love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own
moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's)