"No, begod, one can't!" Mr. Quinn exclaimed. "Do you know this, John Marsh, I never can make out whether God did a good day's work the day He made women! They're the most unsettlin' things in the world. You'd think to look at me, I was a fairly quiet sort of a steady man, wouldn't you? Well, I'm not. There's whiles when a woman makes my head buzz ... just the look of her, an' the way she turns her head or moves her legs. I'm a hefty fellow, John Marsh, for all I'm the age I am, an' I know what it is to feel damn near silly with desire. But all the same, I can keep control of myself, an' I've never wronged a woman in my life. That's a big thing for any man to be able to say, an' there's few that can say it, but I tell you it's been a hell of a fight!..." He lay back in the chair and puffed smoke above his head for a while. "A hell of a fight," he murmured, and then did not speak for a while. "Yes?" said John Marsh. "I've been down the lanes of a summer night, an' seen young girls from the farms about, with fine long hair hangin' down their backs, an' them smilin' an' lovely ... an' begod, I've had to hurry past them, hurry hard, damn near run!... Mind you, they were good girls, John Marsh! I don't want you to think they were out lookin' for men. They weren't. But they were young, an' they were just learnin' things, an' I daresay I could have had them if I'd tried ... an' I don't think there's any real harm in men an' women goin' together ... but we've settled, all of us, that, real or no real, there is _some_ sort of harm in it, an' we've agreed to condemn that sort of thing, an' so I submit to the law. Do you follow me?" "No, not quite. Those sort of things don't arise for me. I'm a Catholic and I obey the Church's laws!..." "I know you do. But I'm a man, not a Catholic!... Now, don't lose your temper. I couldn't help lettin' that slip out.... What I mean is this. There's a lot of waywardness in all of us, that's pleasant enough if it's checked when it gets near the limit of things, but there has to be a check!" "Yes?" Marsh said. "And in my case the check is the Church, the expression on earth of God's will!..." "Well, in my case it isn't. In my case it's my sense of responsibility as a gentleman. We've got ourselves into crowds that must be controlled somehow, and there isn't much room for wayward people in a crowd. That's why geniuses get such a rotten time. Now, my notion of a gentleman is a man who controls the crowd by controllin' himself. D'you follow me? He knows that the crowd'll bust up an' become a dirty riot if it's let out of control, an' he knows that he can influence it best an' keep the whip hand of it, if it knows that he isn't doin' anything that he tells it not to do. D'you see?" "Yes," Marsh said. "That's the Catholic religion!..."