All the same, he could not so easily away with modern literature, for he was suffering from the itch to write, and had already half-planned, being, like every one else, subject to the moral disease of the time, an essay on Woman. Wherry and the rest brought him up sharp: they made him very angry, but they made him perceive in himself many of the distressing symptoms he had found in them. He gave more thought to them, and, though he knew nothing of how these books were written, or of the conditions under which literature was at that time produced and marketed, he came to see these men and women as mountebanks in a fair, each shouting outside a little tent. "Come inside and see what Woman is like." And some showed bundles of clothes, with nobody inside them; and some showed life-size dolls; and some showed women nude to the waist; and some showed women with bared legs; and some showed women in pink fleshings; and some showed naked women who had lost their modesty, and therefore could not be gazed upon without offence. He pondered his own essay, and recognized that its subject was not Woman, but Matilda. In that gallery he could not show her, nor could he, without shame, display her to the public view. And therein, it seemed to him, he had touched the secret of all these lewd exhibitions. The displayers of them, in their impatient haste to catch the pennies of the public, or admiration, or whatever they might be desiring, were presenting, raw, confused and unimagined, their own unfelt and uncogitated experience, or, sometimes, an extension of their experience, in which, by an appalling logic, while they limned life as they would like to live it, they were led to the limits of unreason and egoistic folly. In presentation or extension, only those shows had any compelling force in which egoism was complete and entire lack of feeling relieved the showmen of fine scruples or human decency. Where shreds of decency were left they only served to show up the horrible obscenity of the rest. Looking at it in this light--and there seemed no other way of correlating this literature with human life--Old Mole was distressed. "It is bad enough," he thought, "when they make a public show of their emotions, but when they parade emotions they never had, that is the abomination of desolation."