own imagination made visible by some prodigy to him. For a still
briefer space Rosette shared Albert's dream, and man and wife remained
faithful to each other. It is easy to imagine the vileness which a
prosecuting counsel could extract from these beautiful pages made
entirely of vision and ecstasy. How false and shameful is the whole
business. We are allowed to state that we prefer pagan morality to
Christian, but are interdicted from illustrating our beliefs by
incident. So long as we confine ourselves to theory we are unmolested.
But these are subtleties which do not trouble the minds of the members
of vigilance associations, the men and women who gather together in
back parlors with lead pencils to mark out passages which they
consider "un-Kur-istean" (a good strong accent on the second
syllable). Their thoughts pursue beaten tracks. Books like
"Mademoiselle de Maupin" they hold would act directly on the
temperament, and we know that they do not do this, we know that the
things of the intellect belong to the intellect and the things of the
flesh to the flesh. Were it otherwise Rose Leicester, the pretty
school mistress, might have been left out of my story entitled "The
Lake," and her place taken by a book. My lady correspondent, it will
be remembered, was in favor of some doctrinal difficulty. My second
correspondent, the secretary of the charitable institution, would have
chosen as the cause of Father Oliver's flight a sensual book. His
choice might have been Burton's "Arabian Nights"; better still
Casanova's "Memoirs," for this is a book written almost entirely with
the senses; the intellect hardly ever intrudes itself; and instead of
an emaciated priest poring over a dusty folio we should have had an
inflamed young man curled up in an armchair reading eagerly, walking
up and down the room from time to time, unable to contain himself, and
eventually throwing the book aside, he would find his way down to the
lake.