undergoing his expiatory temptations, Mahomet and Brigham Young
receiving supplementary revelations, grim men babbling secrets to
schoolgirls, enamoured errand boys, amorous old women, debauchees
dreaming themselves thoroughly sensible men and going about their queer
proceedings with insane self-satisfaction, beautiful witless young
persons dressed in the most amazing things, all down the vista of
history--a Vision of Fair Women--looking their conscious queenliest,
sentimentalists crawling over every aspect and leaving tracks like
snails, flushed young blockheads telling the world "all about women,"
intrigue, folly--you have as much of it as one pen may condense in old
Burton's Anatomy--and through it all a vast multitude of decent,
respectable bodies pretending to have quite solved the problem--until
one day, almost shockingly, you get their secret from a careless
something glancing out of the eyes. Most preposterous of all for some
reason is a figure--one is maliciously disposed to present it as
feminine and a little unattractive, goloshed for preference, and saying
in a voice of cultivated flatness, "Why cannot we be perfectly plain
and sensible, and speak quite frankly about this matter?" The answer to
which one conceives, would be near the last conclusions of Philosophy.

So much seethes about the plain discussion of the question of sexual
institutions. One echoes the intelligent inquiry of that quite
imaginary, libellously conceived lady in goloshes with a smile and a
sigh. As well might she ask, "Why shouldn't I keep my sandwiches in the
Ark of the Covenant? There's room!" "Of course there's room," one
answers, "but--As things are, Madam, it is inadvisable to try. You see
--for one thing--people are so peculiar. The quantity of loose stones in
this neighbourhood."

The predominant feeling about the discussion of these things is, to