ue was the shadow of the old intolerably
narrow order; it is a shadow we want to illuminate out of existence.
Secrets will be contraband in the new time.

And if it chances to you to feel called upon to make a breach with the
institution or custom or prejudice that is, remember that doing so
is your own affair. You are going to take risks and specialize as an
experiment. You must not expect other people about you to share the
consequences of your dash forward. You must not drag in confidants and
secondaries. You must fight your little battle in front on your own
responsibility, unsupported--and take the consequences without repining.

3.31. CONDUCT TOWARDS TRANSGRESSORS.

So far as breaches of the prohibitions and laws of marriage go, to me it
seems they are to be tolerated by us in others just in the measure that,
within the limits set by discretion, they are frank and truthful and
animated by spontaneous passion and pervaded by the quality of beauty.
I hate the vulgar sexual intriguer, man or woman, and the smart and
shallow atmosphere of unloving lust and vanity about the type as I hate
few kinds of human life; I would as lief have a polecat in my home as
this sort of person; and every sort of prostitute except the victim of
utter necessity I despise, even though marriage be the fee. But honest
lovers should be I think a charge and pleasure for us. We must judge
each pair as we can.

One thing renders a sexual relationship incurably offensive to others
and altogether wrong, and that is cruelty. But who can define cruelty?
How far is the leaving of a third person to count as cruelty? There
again I hesitate to judge. To love and not be loved is a fate for which
it seems no one can be blamed; to lose love and to change one's loving
belongs to a subtle interplay beyond analysis or control, but to be
deceived or mocked or deliberately robbed of love, that at any rate is
an abominable wrong.

In all these matters I perceive a general rule is in itself a possible
instrument of cruelty. I set down what I can in the way of general
principles, but it all leaves off far short of the point of application.
Every case among those we know I think we moderns must judge for
ourselves. Where there is doubt, there I hold must be charity. And with
regard to strangers, manifestly our duty is to avoid inquisitorial and
uncharitable acts.

This is as true of financial and economic misconduct as of sexual
misconduct, of ways