g cricket, or dreaming over the white naked beauty of a Greek
statue to a game of football under Rugby rules. If our virtues are not
cut on a pattern, they are unnatural. If our vices are not according to
rule, they are unnatural. We must be good naturally. We must sin
naturally. We must live naturally, and die naturally. Branwell Bronte
died standing up, and the world has looked upon him as a blasphemer ever
since. Why must we stand up to live, and lie down to die? Byron had a
club foot in his mind, and so Byron is a by-word. Yet twisted minds are
as natural to some people as twisted bodies. It is natural to one man to
live like Charles Kingsley, to preach gentleness, and love sport; it is
natural to another to dream away his life on the narrow couch of an
opium den, with his head between a fellow-sinner's feet. I love what are
called warped minds, and deformed natures, just as I love the long necks
of Burne-Jones' women, and the faded rose-leaf beauty of Walter Pater's
unnatural prose. Nature is generally purely vulgar, just as many women
are vulgarly pure. There are only a few people in the world who dare to
defy the grotesque code of rules that has been drawn up by that
fashionable mother, Nature, and they defy--as many women drink, and many
men are vicious--in secret, with the door locked and the key in their
pockets. And what is life to them? They can always hear the footsteps of
the detective in the street outside."

"Society must have its police while Society has its criminals," said
Lady Locke, a little warmly.

"Yes. The person who is called a 'copper,' because you can only bribe
him with silver, or with gold."

"I think it is essentially a question of the preponderance of numbers,"
she added more quietly. "Warped and twisted minds are in the minority.
If more than half the world had club feet, we should not think the
club-footed man a cripple."

"Ah! that is just the mistake that every one makes nowadays. Unnatural
minds are far more common, and therefore, according to the middle-class
view, more natural than people choose to suppose. I believe that the
tyranny of minorities is the plague that we suffer under. How intensely
interesting it would be to take a census of vices. Why should we take
infinite trouble to find out how old we are. Age is a question of
temperament, just as youth is a question of health. We are not
interesting because of what we are, but because of what we do."

"But we reveal what w