"As you say that," I said, "you remind me of that woman, Mrs. Millamant, in Congreve's play, 'The Way of the World.' Do you remember that scene between her and Mirabell, when she attaches 'provisos' to her consent to marry him? She says, 'We must be as strange as though we had been married a long time, and as well bred as though we had never been married at all.' And it seems to me that she was right, and that you are right, Shelmerdene. Nowadays there is a reaction against convention, and such people make life unclean. They talk about being 'natural,' and succeed only in being boorish; they think that the opposite of 'natural' is 'artificial,' but that is absurd, for why was the title 'gentleman' invented if not for the man who could put a presentable gloss on his primitive, 'natural' instincts in polite company? There must always be etiquette in life and in love, and there is no friendship or passion which can justify familiarity trying to break down the barriers which hide every man and every woman from the outside world. Men grow mentally limp with their careless way of living; and life is like walking on the Embankment at three o'clock in the morning, when London is very silent: and if you lounge along as your feet take you, your hands deep in your pockets, being 'natural,' you will see very little but the general darkness of the night and the patch of pavement on which your eyes are glued: but if you walk upright, your mind taut and rigid as it always must be except when asleep, then you will see many things, how the river looks strange beneath the stars, the mystery of Battersea Park which might, in the darkness, be an endless forest of distantly murmuring trees, the figure of a policeman by the bridge, a light here and there in the windows of the houses in Cheyne Walk, which might mean birth or death or nothing, but is food for your mind because you are living and interested in all living things. It was probably some wise philosopher, an Epicurean, and not a buffoon, as is supposed, who first uttered that saying which is now become farcical, that 'distance lends enchantment.' For he did not mean the material distance of yards and furlongs and miles, but the distance of necessary strangeness, of inevitable mystery, and of a rigid mental etiquette, the good manners of the mind. And that is why Henry James was a great man, and with a great propaganda. He was subtle with his propaganda--an ugly word which can be used for other things than the bawling of tiresome men in this Park on Sunday afternoons--for he could do nothing without an almost obvious subtlety; but it is there in all his work, a teaching for all who care to be taught. In the world of Henry James, for he was more fastidious than Meredith or Mr. Hardy and would have nothing to do with this world as it was, but made one of his own, in this world the men and women are not just men and women, with thoughts and doings bluntly and coarsely