of conversation begins, they'll laugh. and wake up and throw
themselves about in their chairs. Then, if they so delight in the
narration, how is it possible that they can be offended--and
properly offended--at the suggestion that they might make
attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again: Edward Ashburnham
was the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excellent magistrate, a
first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in
Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I
myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And
he never told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of
the Field more than once or twice in all the nine years of my
knowing him. He didn't even like hearing them; he would fidget
and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You
would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you
could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was
madness. And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was
dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions--and they say
that is always the hall-mark of a libertine--what about myself? For
I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted at
an impropriety in my conversation in the whole of my days; and
more than that, I will vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and
the absolute chastity of my life. At what, then, does it all work out?
Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a
eunuch or is the proper man--the man with the right to
existence--a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's
womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is
so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex,
what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other