"Simply because it is. Indecent means unseemly. Your sex were slaves, they were weaker physically, less robust; they were made beasts of burden, were beaten and made slaves. Then men, for their own pleasure, lifted them up a little and paid court to them, and finally the idea and age of chivalry came--based on the high Christian morality. You were placed on a pinnacle. Men loved and fought for your favor and made it the guerdon of their highest emprise, guarded you with a mist of adoration, gave you a halo, worshipped you as something cleaner and better and purer than themselves; built up a wall of division and protection for you. Why should you go and cast it down, fling it away, and come down in the mire and dust and dirt?" "But I don't want to be adored--set up on a pedestal." "Then you probably will not be," interrupted my deaf neighbor. "I want to be treated as an equal--as an--an--intelligent being." "I should think that would depend on yourself. I do not quite understand whom you wish to be the equal of--of men? Men are a very large class--some are very low indeed." "Oh! You know what I mean--of course, I don't mean that sort." "You mean gentlemen?" "Certainly." "Then I assure you you cannot discuss indecent subjects in mixed company; gentlemen never do. Nor write coarse books--gentlemen never do nowadays--nor discuss them either." "Do you mean to say that great novelists never discuss such questions?" she demanded triumphantly. "No, but it is all in the manner--the motive. I have no objection to the matter--generally, provided it be properly handled--but the obvious intention--the rank indecentness of it. See how Scott or George Eliot, or Tolstoi or Turgénieff, or, later on, even Zola, handles such vital themes. How different their motive from the reeking putrescence of the so-called problem-novel." "Oh! dear! they must be very bad indeed!" exclaimed a lady, shocked by the sound of my adjectives. "They are," suddenly put in my oldest neighbor, who had been listening intently with his hand behind his ear, "only you ladies don't know how bad they are or you would not discuss them with men." This closed the discussion and a group of ladies near me suddenly branched off into another subject and one which interested me more than the discussion of such literature as the trash which goes by the name of the problem novel. "Who is Eleanor Leigh in love with?" asked some one irrelevantly--a Mrs. Arrow--whose mind appeared much given to dwelling on such problems. She addressed the company generally, and possibly my former neighbor at the table in particular. "Is she in love?" asked another. "Certainly, I never saw any one so changed. Why, she has been moping so I scarcely know her--and she has taken to charity. That's a sure sign. I think it must be that young preacher she talks so much about."