could at any moment do and which, very
often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is
that to _me_ this did not seem unjust. If the miller's third son said to
the fairy, "Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy
palace," the other might fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that,
explain the fairy palace." If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must
leave the ball at twelve?" her godmother might answer, "How is it that
you are going there till twelve?" If I leave a man in my will ten
talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the
conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not
look a winged horse in the mouth. And it seemed to me that existence was
itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not
understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand
the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The
veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as
the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the
towering trees.

For this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy) I never
could join the young men of my time in feeling what they called the
general sentiment of _revolt_. I should have resisted, let us hope, any
rules that were evil, and with these and their definition I shall deal
in another chapter. But I did not feel disposed to resist any rule
merely because it was mysterious. Estates are sometimes held by foolish
forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn: I was
willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal
fantasy. It could not well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to
hold it at all. At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show
my meaning. I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising
generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd
and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love
to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a
harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar
anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing
one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like
complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with
the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an
exaggerated sensibility to