“It’s simply another of our stupid taboos,” said Charmian, puffing grandly to show her independence, and choking just a little now and then. “We’re hemmed in with taboos on all sides. They are grounded in our conservative minds from childhood, and we can’t shake them off. Years ago some one decided that women ought not to smoke. Some one agreed with him. Others took it up, perhaps; and finally it became the accepted rule. So in childhood we were taught that women shouldn’t smoke--that good women didn’t smoke. We grew up unaccustomed to see women smoking. Therefore when we encountered an occasional individual who did smoke, she was considered immoral. But why immoral? What is there immoral about placing a cigarette between one’s lips, lighting it, and inhaling and exhaling the smoke? Injurious it may be, but we’re not discussing that phase of the subject. A man may thus injure himself with impunity, but if a woman does so she is immoral. Now isn’t that illogical?” “Logic plays a small part in our lives,” said Shonto. “We’re not on very friendly terms with logic. Logic means thinking and shaking off the old ideas that are handed down to us from the ancients, and we’re too lazy to do that. Logic calls for reasoning, and why reason when our beliefs and our behaviour have been regulated for us for seventeen or eighteen hundred years? Why think for ourselves, when the ancients went to so much trouble to prescribe for us our taboos and our religious beliefs and our standard of morals? Why think, in short? It’s such hard work. And it has a tendency to uproot old beliefs in which we are quite comfortable. We might feel the urge to clean house if we sat down and thought a little, and everybody knows how upsetting is house-cleaning day!” “And isn’t there any hope for us, Doctor Shonto? Will nothing make us think?” Shonto’s dull eyes brightened. “Yes, we’re beginning to think. The great war did that much for us here in America, anyway. I really believe there is a serious attempt being made to-day to think. People are at least trying to think. They are at least reading more thoughtful books than ever before, and, thank God, we have a few men who are capable of writing thoughtful books! There’s a whisper going along the line, a faint and timorous suggestion that maybe all is not as it should be on this earth--that maybe we are selling our heritage for a mess of pottage--that perhaps we are trampling life’s riches under our feet, like swine trampling into the mud nuggets of gold as they rush to the swill trough.