s what notions are seething in the bean of any girl
you talk to at Palla's house!"

Estridge laughed: "What do you care, Jim?"

"Well, I wouldn't care if they all didn't seem so exactly like one's
own sort. Why, to look at them, talk to them, you'd never suppose them
queer! The young girl you take in to dinner usually looks as though
butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. And the chances are that she's all
for socialism, self-determination, trial marriages and free love!

"Hell's bells! I'm no prude. I like to overstep conventions, too. But
this wholesale wrecking of the social structure would be ruinous for a
girl like Palla."

"But Palla doesn't believe in free love."

"She hears it talked about by cracked illuminati."

"Rain on a duck's back, Jim!"

"Rain drowns young ducks."

"You mean all this spouting will end in a deluge?"

"I do. And then look for dead ducks."

"You're not very respectful toward modernism," remarked Estridge,
smiling.

Then Jim broke loose:

"Modernism? You yourself said that all these crazy social notions--crazy
notions in art, literature, music--arise from some sort of physical
degeneration, or from the perversion or checking of normal physical
functions."

"Usually they do----"

"Well," continued Shotwell, "it's mostly due to perversion, in my
opinion. Women have had too much of a hell of a run for their money
during this war. They've broken down all the fences and they're loose
and running all over the world.

"If they'd only kept their fool heads! But no. Every germ in the wind
lodged in their silly brains! Biff. They want sex equality and a pair
of riding breeches! Bang! They kick over the cradle and wreck the
pantry.

"Wifehood? Played out! Motherhood? In the discards! Domestic
partnership?--each sex to its own sphere? Ha-ha! That was all very
well yesterday. But woman as a human incubator and brooder is an
obsolete machine. Why the devil should free and untramelled womanhood
hatch out young?

"If they choose to, casually, all right. But it's purely a matter for
self-determination. If a girl cares to take off her Sam Brown belt and
her puttees long enough to nurse a baby, it's a matter that concerns
her, not humanity at large. Because the social revolution has settled
all such details as personal independence and the same standard for
both sexes. So, _a bas_ Madame Grundy! _A la lanterne_ with the old
regime! No--hang it all, I'm through!"

"Don't you like Palla any