should never become "better" than the female young, either actually or
constructively present, are minded to allow it. THAT system involves as
little compromise as the French; it has been absolutely simple, and the
beauty of its success shines out in every record of our conditions of
intercourse--premising always our "basic" assumption that the female
young read the newspapers. The English theory may be in itself almost as
simple, but different and much more complex forces have ruled the
application of it; so much does the goodness of talk depend on what
there may be to talk about. There are more things in London, I think,
than anywhere in the world; hence the charm of the dramatic struggle
reflected in my book, the struggle somehow to fit propriety into a
smooth general case which is really all the while bristling and
crumbling into fierce particular ones. The circle surrounding Mrs.
Brookenham, in my pages, is of course nothing if not a particular, even
a "peculiar" one--and its rather vain effort (the vanity, the real
inexpertness, being precisely part of my tale) is toward the courage of
that condition. It has cropped up in a social order where individual
appreciations of propriety have not been formally allowed for, in spite
of their having very often quite rudely and violently and insolently,
rather of course than insidiously, flourished; so that as the matter
stands, rightly or wrongly, Nanda's retarded, but eventually none the
less real, incorporation means virtually Nanda's exposure. It means
this, that is, and many things beside--means them for Nanda herself
and, with a various intensity, for the other participants in the action;
but what it particularly means, surely, is the failure of successful
arrangement and the very moral, sharply pointed, of the fruits of
compromise. It is compromise that has suffered her to be in question at
all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle to be self-
conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than brave--the
consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing meanwhile