Mallard interrupted with a laugh. "Well, why not?" continued the other. "This isn't the _gabinetto_ at Naples, surely?" "But you are well aware that, practically, it comes to the same thing. How often is one half pained, half amused, at the behaviour of women in the Tribune at Florence! They are in a false position; it is absurd to ridicule them for what your own sensations justify. For my own part, I always leave my wife and Mrs. Baske to go about these galleries without my company. If I can't be honestly at my ease, I won't make pretence of being so." "All this is true enough, but the prejudice is absurd. We ought to despise it and struggle against it." "Despise it, many of us do, theoretically. But to make practical demonstrations against it, is to oppose, as I said, all the civilization of our world. Perhaps there will come a time once more when sculpture will be justified; at present the art doesn't and can't exist. Its relics belong to museums--in the English sense of the word." "You only mean by this," said Mallard, "that art isn't for the multitude. We know that well enough." "But there's a special difficulty about this point. We come across it in literature as well. How is it that certain pages in literature, which all intellectual people agree in pro flouncing just as pure as they are great, could never be read aloud, say, in a family circle, without occasioning pain and dismay? No need to give illustrations; they occur to you in abundance. We skip them, or we read mutteringly, or we say frankly that this is not adapted for reading aloud. Yet no man would frown if he found his daughter bent over the book. There's something radically wrong here." "This is the old question of our English Puritanism. In France, here in Italy, there is far less of such feeling." "Far less; but why must there be any at all? And Puritanism isn't a sufficient explanation. The English Puritans of the really Puritan time had freedom of conversation which would horrify us of to-day. We become more and more prudish as what we call civilization advances. It is a hateful fact that, from the domestic point of view, there exists no difference between some of the noblest things in art and poetry, and the obscenities which are prosecuted; the one is as impossible of frank discussion as the other." "The domestic point of view is contemptible. It means the bourgeois point of view, the Philistine point of view." "Then I myself, if I had children, should be both bourgeois and Philistine. And so, I have a strong suspicion, would you too."