I mustn't waste myself in little spasms then. How about correspondence? "ça forme le style," Balzac told Gautier, and rather grudged him that concession. Ulick smiled. He knew his master-weakness, his vice. He knew that when the flesh moved him the spirit took a holiday. No self abnegation for him, no transposition to his cortical cells of his sexual longing. Like a bull he saw red everywhere. It's a pity all the same, he sighed. I should marry, raise a family and be unfaithful to my wife not more than twice weekly. The programme of the majority of good fathers, good husbands. And the American man is the worst of the lot. A regular Turk plus a religious humbug. And some clergymen! Town bulls. Over in Brooklyn they put up statues to their piety--and virility. Bon! They should. A womanly woman is admirable, and she is not rare. A virile man is as rare nowadays as a chaste one. What an enormous faculty of inattention I possess! I wander, I stray into the queerest pastures. What's this I've written? Philanthropy is inverted egotism. True. All the immortal turpitudes are to be found in the ranks of the philanthropists. A pecuniary heresy. The latrines of my soul were overflowing in Paris. Am I purer in New York? Here we buy our ecstasy, rent that brief syncope called passion. What's the difference? It's the début that counts. The fury of enlacement leaves me a cynic. I wonder if women feel the same? That eternal triangle of theirs. And the pensile penguin of the eternal masculine. Wicked Walt has in The Children of Adam made some stunning phrases about the procreative organs. People who rave over his rotten poetry wouldn't read him if he hadn't been an exhibitionist in print. No one with a particle of taste seduces a young girl nowadays; they wait till she is married--it saves time and trouble. "Sir," roared old Doctor Johnson, "maidenheads are for ploughboys." Oh, the delicious, pernicious conversation that depraves. Thought deforms. Seduction by starlight sometimes ends in a police court with a fornication and bastardy charge. Anyhow, we must have our psychic satisfactions, else spiritual atony. Why this mania of certitude in the choice of a phrase? Pure dandyism of style. Goethe said in his Truth and Poetry, "All herein is true; nothing exact." That is fine in its implications. Stained-glass socialism! Most of it is nothing else. Anything to keep out the daylight of reality. Like the tigress that has tasted human flesh and blood so is the woman who knows man; neither are satisfied but with human prey. That's why widows remarry or--: why seduced girls "fall" again--though Ulick smiled at that silly word--why, convents are peopled by disillusioned souls--and there is a waiting list!