A function that is natural and clean enough in itself has been fouled by the pruderies of priests and pedants. Sex has been disguised with all manner of hypocrisies and make-believes. Society pretends that certain things do not happen, and when Nature insists upon their happening, Society retaliates upon the woman by calling her foul names and making her an outcast. The men themselves are driven by the system to all those wretched meannesses, treacheries, deceptions. And the worst of it all is that Society tries to keep the truth boxed up in a cellar. English good form prides itself with a smirk on not talking about such things, and on playing the ostrich with its head under a pew cushion. Nature is not treated fairly and squarely. We are immorally moral in our conventions. Until we decide to look at sex cleanly and wholesomely, stripping ourselves of all mediæval nastiness and cowardly smuggery, we shall remain what we are, furtive polygamists, ashamed of our own bodies, and absurdly calling our own children the creatures of sin. The work depressed Eve. Her fellow workers were hardly more enlivening. They belonged to a distinct type, the neutral type that cannot be appealed to either as man or woman. Meals were served at a long table in one of the lower rooms, and Eve noticed that her neighbours did not in the least care what they ate. They got through a meal as quickly as possible, talking hard all the time. Now Eve did care about what she ate, and whether it was delicately served. She had the palate of a healthy young woman, and it mattered to her whether she had ragged mutton and rice pudding every day, or was piqued by something with a flavour. She was carnal. She told herself so flatly one afternoon as she went up to her bedroom, and the charge produced a thrill of natural laughter. She had a sudden wild desire to run out and play, to be greedy as a healthy child is greedy, to tumble hay in a hay field, to take off her clothes and bathe in the sea. The natural vitality in her turned suddenly from all this sour, quarrelsome, pessimistical campaigning and demanded life—the life of feeling and seeing.