are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man
had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as
they are, than be brought to the bar of the Nonconformist Conscience by
Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as
it was in the X century.

As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of
sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events
the enormous superiority of Woman's natural position in this matter is
telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the Nonconformist
Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of the
Commandant's statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the
question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to a hero
with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan's own beard that is in danger of
plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle feared,
he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality. The growing
recognition of his new point of view is heaping responsibility on him.
His former jests he has had to take as seriously as I have had to take
some of the jests of Mr W. S. Gilbert. His scepticism, once his least
tolerated quality, has now triumphed so completely that he can no
longer assert himself by witty negations, and must, to save himself from
cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs
of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to
sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded
altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to
his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of
pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche,
studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead
of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his
dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the