onventions that had bound her from
childhood to well into middle life, had remained at home, no doubt she
would have spent a large part of her nights in thinking out ways of
employing her days in outraging the conventionalities before her
horrified and infuriated neighbors. But of what use in New York to
cuff and spit upon deities revered by only an insignificant class--and
only officially revered by that class? Agnes had soon seen that there
was no amusement or interest whatever in an enterprise which in her New
England home would have filled her life to the brim with excitement.
Also, she saw that she was well into that time of life where the
absence of reputation in a woman endangers her comfort, makes her
liable to be left alone--not despised and denounced, but simply avoided
and ignored. So she was telling Mildred the exact truth. She had laid
down the arms she had taken up against the social system, and had come
in--and was fighting it from the safer and wiser inside. She still
insisted that a woman had the same rights as a man; but she took care
to make it clear that she claimed those rights only for others, that
she neither exercised them nor cared for them for herself. And to make
her propaganda the more effective, she was not only circumspect
herself, but was exceedingly careful to be surrounded by circumspect
people. No one could cite her case as proof that woman would expand
liberty into license. In theory there was nothing lively that she did
not look upon at least with tolerance; in practice, more and more she
disliked seeing one of her sex do anything that might cause the world
to say "woman would abuse liberty if she had it." "Sensible people,"
she now said, "do as they like. But they don't give fools a chance to
titter and chatter."

Agnes Belloc was typical--certainly of a large and growing class in
this day--of the decay of ancient temples and the decline of the
old-fashioned idealism that made men fancy they lived nobly because
they professed and believed nobly. She had no ethical standards. She
simply met each situation as it arose and dealt with it as common sense
seemed in that particular instance to dictate. For a thousand years
genius has been striving with the human race to induce it to abandon
its superstitions and hypocrisies and to defy common sense, so
adaptable, so tolerant, so conducive to long and healthy and happy
life. Grossly materialistic, but alluringly comfortable. Whe