JOHN: Well--to start with ... the obvious things. (_He talks without difficulty, speaking what he has thought about._) Hundreds of thousands of girls on the streets; and an incredible amount of sex disease. One in every five infected! A million or so girls more than men doomed to a life without love. Some millions of separated people living without love and not allowed to marry again. Thousands of marriages where only distaste, and hate, remain. Ugliness, and cruelty, and intolerance about the whole subject that makes the sum of unnecessary suffering almost incredible. Does all that sound like a success? After all, we’re responsible to the next generation for the sort of world they’ll find. Have we any right to say, “Oh, that’s all right; we can’t do better than that. We needn’t bother”? Look at all the girls in the world, Frankie--one lot selling themselves to any man who can pay them; the rest brought up in a sort of prison of asceticism, as candidates for the privilege of becoming a man’s married housekeeper. COLIN: Oh, come, John! Nowadays there are a great many “betwixt and betweeners,” as it were! JOHN: The whole thing’s breaking up. COLIN: Then why bother? JOHN: The break-up is all so undirected and casual. MARGARET: Are you so sure it is breaking up? JOHN: Yes. Quite. GWEN: Why? JOHN (_definitely, and as the result of previous thought_): The Church is losing its influence. COLIN: I shouldn’t have thought that mattered tuppence. JOHN: It’s fundamental. COLIN: How? JOHN: For hundreds of years the Church has had the most enormous influence by its hold over the lives of men and women in this way. Hasn’t it? COLIN: Yes. JOHN: Obviously its attitude towards the whole thing is fundamental. COLIN: Yes. JOHN: It regards sex as sin. It’s holy when the Church permits it in matrimony; and then it’s got to remain holy, for ever and ever Amen. GWEN: As if it did. JOHN: They couldn’t stop people loving outside their rules; but they’ve made them ashamed of it. They’ve made sex a secret furtive thing. Well, anyhow, we’ve got _our_ chance now. MARGARET: Why _now_, particularly? JOHN: The Church built the system, and as a binding force it’s no longer effective. Here’s your society--in a certain mould; but the power that did the moulding, that held it together, has gone. It’s vaguely keeping its shape, at present--but it’s crumbling. It must crumble; and it’ll have to be remodelled. That was going on, anyhow. Then the war came. Everything shaken to its foundations. Personal beliefs, institutions--everything. The world’s fluid. That’s why it’s all so damnably important now. FRANKIE: If it’s all as bad as you say, surely if people lived as Religion tells them, all these terrible things wouldn’t happen?