the fire-irons bent and worn, his linen frayed about the cuffs.

"I don't wish to dictate," said he, "but where it seems to me that you
are wholly wrong in that your ideas foster in women those lax views of
the family life that are so prevalent in Society nowadays."

Thoughts of Antonia with her candid eyes, the touch of freckling on her
pink-white skin, the fair hair gathered back, sprang up in Shelton, and
that word--"lax" seemed ridiculous. And the women he was wont to see
dragging about the streets of London with two or three small children,
Women bent beneath the weight of babies that they could not leave,
women going to work with babies still unborn, anaemic-looking women,
impecunious mothers in his own class, with twelve or fourteen children,
all the victims of the sanctity of marriage, and again the word "lax"
seemed to be ridiculous.

"We are not put into the world to exercise our wits,"--muttered Shelton.

"Our wanton wills," the parson said severely.

"That, sir, may have been all right for the last generation, the
country is more crowded now. I can't see why we should n't decide it for
ourselves."

"Such a view of morality," said the parson, looking down at Crocker with
a ghostly smile, "to me is unintelligible."

Cracker's whistling grew in tone and in variety.

"What I hate," said Shelton, "is the way we men decide what women are
to bear, and then call them immoral, decadent, or what you will, if they
don't fall in with our views."

"Mr. Shelton," said the parson, "I think we may safely leave it in the
hands of God."

Shelton was silent.

"The questions of morality," said the parson promptly, "have always lain
through God in the hands of men, not women. We are the reasonable sex."

Shelton stubbornly replied

"We 're certainly the greater humbugs, if that 's the same."

"This is too bad," exclaimed the parson with some heat.

"I 'm sorry, sir; but how can you expect women nowadays to have the same
views as our grandmothers? We men, by our commercial enterprise, have
brought about a different state of things; yet, for the sake of our own
comfort, we try to keep women where they were. It's always those men who
are most keen about their comfort"--and in his heat the sarcasm of using
the word "comfort" in that room was lost on him--"who are so ready to
accuse women of deserting the old morality."

The parson quivered with impatient irony.

"Old morality! new morality!" he said. "These are