“Your generation,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “has more opportunities for being a mess than ours had. That’s what I meant. And your children will have more opportunities than you have. There is a certain amount of horse-sense in the reluctance of many young fellows nowadays to having wives of their own. They’re afraid of getting it in the neck from the results. For whereas you have motors and telephones and wireless with which to lose your sense of the stabilities, as you are losing them, they will have cheap aeroplanes as well. When you people nowadays begin to break loose there’s no limit to your looseness. There was in my father’s time. They couldn’t get about so quickly. They couldn’t grub about in so many cesspools at one time, rushing in a night between London and any vile paradise of the vulgarities like Deauville or the present Riviera. Even if they broke loose a little--the women, I mean--they generally had to make some compromise with the decencies simply because they had to live in the place, they couldn’t make an appointment with a trunk-call to Paris and go and have a few days’ ‘fun’ there. But now if a woman has kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity there’s the whole world open for her to play the mischief in, there’s every invention in the world to help her indulge her intolerable little lusts....” I mastered an irrational impulse to try to defend Iris against the friend of her childhood. I would have liked to say that the little lusts were intolerable most of all to Iris. Hilary would almost have sympathised with that in Iris, for it would seem that the only vice a man of principle can understand is the vice of not enjoying what he has forfeited his principles to do. Hilary couldn’t, obviously, forgive Iris for not having grown common and meretricious and, in the slim beastly sense, coarse, as the other “rotten ladies” did. He couldn’t, obviously, forgive her for the continued graciousness of her outward seeming, and of her inner seeming too, if one didn’t know those things about her. He couldn’t, obviously, forgive her for being so indifferent to every distinction of class that she was equally indifferent, with the whole calm of her mind, to being “declassed.” And he couldn’t, obviously, forgive himself for still, God knew how, seeing in her the same qualities that he had seen in the long little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes. If only Hilary had been a sentimentalist, and could have closed his eyes against what he did not wish to see and could have opened his eyes to see all that he did wish to see! But Hilary was a realist with a backward-seeing eye. The Iris of long ago should have been dead, choked to death by this grown-up Iris--but, and there lay the perversity of this grown-up Iris who had kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity, it wasn’t dead at all, she was still essentially the same Iris who had walked with her governess up South Audley Street.