a long way before you find a married man who will admit that he
is, but the facts are the facts, and I am surely not one to flout them.

36. The Origin of a Delusion

The origin of the delusion that the average man is a Leopold II or
Augustus the Strong, with the amorous experience of a guinea pig, is not
far to seek. It lies in three factors, the which I rehearse briefly:

1. The idiotic vanity of men, leading to their eternal boasting, either
by open lying or sinister hints.

2. The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, Y. M.C. A.
secretaries, and other such libidinous poltroons as to what they would
do themselves if they had the courage.

3. The ditto of certain suffragettes as to ditto.

Here you have the genesis of a generalization that gives the less
critical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly
augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in
the discharge, of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts
in an evening ploughing through such books as "The Memoirs of Fanny
Hill," Casanova's Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of Gaius
Petronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal he arises with the
conviction that life amid the red lights must be one stupendous whirl of
deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or Piccadilly at night
are out for revels that would have caused protests in Sodom and Nineveh,
that the average man who chooses hell leads an existence comparable
to that of a Mormon bishop, that the world outside the Bible class is
packed like a sardine-can with betrayed salesgirls, that every man who
doesn't believe that Jonah swallowed the whale spends his whole leisure
leaping through the seventh hoop of the Decalogue. "If I were not saved
and anointed of God," whispers the vice director into his own ear, "that
is what I, the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing. The late King
David did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late King Edward
VII was not beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his name has its
suggestions. Millions of others go the same route.... Ergo, Up, guards,
and at 'em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants! Order out the seachlights
and scaling-ladders! Swear in four hundred more policemen! Let us
chase these hell-hounds out of Christendom, and make the world safe for
monogamy, poor working girls, and infant damnation!"

Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his own secret